


Inertia or the laws of motion

by Cards_Slash



Series: Inertia or Laws of Motion [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-09-09
Packaged: 2017-12-15 21:22:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 82,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>it’s not like Romeo and Juliet because nobody dies and it’s not like a romance novel because nobody’s hair is flying in the wind but somehow or another, Bones and Kirk figure out that they’re in love anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. front porch serenade/sinking ship

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: 1. Set in the same world created in Orbit (the love story of George and Winona) although reading it isn’t exactly necessary.  
> 2\. i wouldn’t consider this an au even if I toyed with various accepted notions regarding Bones and Kirk’s backstories.  
> 3\. also yes, it does mention but not graphically describe child abuse.  
> 4\. reposted for Livejournal

**_side a: front porch serenade_**  
Leonard was 12 when he met _the one_. He didn’t know it when he met her because discoveries like that were the sort of thing you worked out in the long, leftover shadows of a summer afternoon right before the sky went black and everything smelled like red clay and tall grass. It was nothing you knew on sight no matter what his dumb sister might have tried to tell him—no, finding _the one_ , well that took extensive research and late-late nights in a rowboat under the moon with the water lick-lapping the sides until you weren’t sure how you hadn’t turned the whole thing over and drowned.

At twelve, Leonard was just a boy with a funny lunchbox that was a little too short for his age and a little too clumsy to be trying out for sports. There was a scar across his shin that everyone always asked him about when he wore his shorts and he always had to say (well I broke my leg once) and they thought that was a little strange a whole lot stupid. Twelve year olds were mean but twelve year old jocks were vicious. When he tried out for soccer they hit him in the head with the ball until he was dizzy and said that if he’d just _dodge_ or _hit it_ then the world would still be standing still around him. But they said _stand there_ and _don’t use your hands_.

Field hockey left him with bruises and an elbow that used to have skin but was now scraped raw by _grass_ and Leonard sat on his rear on the sidelines with his knees bent and his head craning to stare at the damage half-fascinated and half-hurt because he just didn’t know that grass could do that to you. They didn’t say much maybe (well, you tried) or (there’s always basketball). 

The thing was, Leonard wasn’t half brave enough to try out for basketball because he had a healthy appreciation for how hard those gym floors were and well, he’d already broken his leg once in his life. He didn’t need to go off breaking the other one and his left arm too just to prove he was able to throw a ball through a hoop. (He couldn’t, but that wasn’t the point.) Besides, there was a height requirement—he thought, maybe.

The football players laughed him off the field when he showed up. The quarterback with a red-shirt over his jersey said: _Kid, you’re too small to be the_ towel boy. 

So he found himself with his fingers laced through the fence around the baseball field with his funny-looking-lunchbox hanging off his elbow and his bag at his feet. It was not, exactly, a contact sport. It looked simple enough, you swung a bat and ran. He could run. So he worked his way to where you went in and stood in line with the others.

They asked him his name and they gave him a number to put on his shirt. The coach talked big about the _meaning of baseball_. Leonard picked at the knees of his pants until it was his turn to bat and some girl with breasts (not that he cared, he was twelve and they were nothing more than little bumps under T-shirts that were curious but not interesting—it’s just he noticed hers was all) and blonde pigtails handed him the bat.

“Ok,” she said, “what you have to do is imagine that ball is someone you can’t stand—alright? Just knock it right out of the park.” Then she showed him how his hands went—one over the other and stand like this and don’t hit until you were sure.

She stood in the distance like she was afraid of getting hit. Leonard’s heart beat so fast he couldn’t feel his arms and it was all instinct (and maybe he imagined that quarterback’s face on the ball coming at him, mouth open and voice screeching in fear the whole way) when he swung. There was a crack and then a whistle and he was hanging onto the bat and staring at the ball sailing _that way_ and not _this way_.

It felt like his smile split his face open and all his teeth should have fallen right out of his gums—he whipped his head around to find that girl with the blonde hair whooping something as she ran to him. Her hands were shoving his shoulders. “Run, idiot! Run!”

“I did it,” he said and stumbled while she pushed. He dropped the bat and tripped over it and dragged her down into the dirt with him. Only it didn’t matter because that ball was _just gone_ and they might never find it in the grass of the outfield. “I did it!”

“Sure did, genius, where’d you learn to walk?” the girl demanded from him. She was on her elbows in the dirt, frowning at him and all he could think (again and again) was that he’d never been happier in his whole life. “You’re a mess,” she said and turned her head to see his name over the number on his shirt, “McCoy.”

“Leonard,” he said. He was back to his knees and up to his feet and they _still_ hadn’t found the ball. He stuck his dirty hand out to help her up the girl smacked his palm away.

“Run, McCoy,” she said, “while you got the chance.”

\--

Everything Leonard knew about girls he learned from his dumb sister. It wasn’t like she was the only girl that he knew because he had girls everywhere around him from his Granny to his cousin Sara who always had one scrapped knee and a missing tooth (or at least, it seemed like it). He was sick of girls long before it got to that point where his father took him to one side and said it like this:

 _Well, son, you’re old enough now, you must be noticing some_ things. _I just want you to know that I’ll be here if you want to talk and that it doesn’t matter much to me what turns your head so long as you’re happy._

With a heavy pat on his shoulder. Whatever his father thought he was _saying_ , Leonard never did quite figure out. He was two days past thirteen and girls were those strange bumpy creatures that giggled and stared and made him feel like there was a bucket of worms under his skin. Sometimes, at night, when there was nobody else around and he had _nothing better_ to think about he’d think about those girls on the cover of Devon’s books with their clothes all ripped and their hair blowing around in the breeze. Sometimes he felt stupid thinking about them; sometimes he felt like the smartest man there ever was because he _got it_ and this thing called sex was the best damn idea any boy ever had.

He thought—if he had a girl like that, oh _boy_ if he had a girl like that—

Then he woke up the next morning with the feeling of cotton in his mouth and his dumb sister hitting him with his pillow telling him:

_Wake up, Lenny! You think breakfast is going to wait for you? Get yourself right on out of this bed before I get my wooden spoon and motivate you right on out._

Well, that was everything Leonard needed to know about girls right there. Good enough to color his thoughts at night and a real hellish reality come morning. 

\--

Hiding was an art form.

Leonard liked trees but they were real predictable after the first couple of times he got caught up one. Granny always knew where he was (because she was magic, that’s what his Mama had told him way-back-when and he believed it to the day) but she was nice enough to let him get away with his hiding now-and-again. Devon was studying up to be the next Granny and getting it all wrong. She wasn’t nothing but dumb but she seemed to think she knew just about everything anyway.

So she went searching the trees around the house long after Leonard had moved onto climbing the woodpile, grabbing the side of the porch and climbing as high up on the roof as he could. This late into the fall it was kind of nice to be there under that sweet-blue sky with his bag and the whispering breeze. He could spend a whole afternoon up there so long as he brought himself a bottle of something to drink.

Granny would say: _if you pull them shingles off, you’re going to learn how to put them back on, boy_ but she wasn’t angry.

Devon would put her hands on her hips and say: _stop stealing my books, Lenny, I know you’re stealing them and hiding_ somewhere _to read them._

Leonard wasn’t reading her dumb books. At least, he wasn’t reading the whole thing. He’d figured it out. That girl on the cover got to protesting around page seventy but she was always naked and screaming by page ninety and if he skipped every ten or fifteen pages after that they’d be right back at it again. Most of the time, Leonard thought the girl was kind of stupid and all of the time he thought the men involved were just plain _unrealistic_. (Also, maybe, they had to be deaf after a while.)

 _I’m not reading your dumb books_ , he’d snap back at her. She’d go red in the face because she must have thought she knew he was lying (and he was, so it wasn’t like she was wrong). He’d stick his tongue out at her and she’d drag him out to the yard and wrestle him until he had a fat lip and she had bruises from his bony knees and elbows as he flailed and tried to win and not to hurt her.

You never hurt girls but girls could damn well beat the shit out of _you_. At thirteen, Leonard hadn’t figured out the logic of that one yet.

At twenty eight he still hadn’t figured it out but fuck if he could do a thing about it.

\--

His father died on a Tuesday and there was the last game of the season on Thursday. 

It went something like this—

On the porch with his hands in his lap, in a rock-chair, with thermal socks on his feet because Granny must have forgotten they lived in the South where cold was anything below blistering hot. He didn’t rock that old chair because it creaked—nobody was making a noise but the doctor that was _inside_ while he was _out_ and maybe Devon was hiccupping little sobs because she couldn’t help herself. Leonard wasn’t sure what he should have felt right about then but he felt nothing but fuck-all empty.

Just like that, and if a boy was going to lose his father he could say _fuck all_ and mean it just _like that_. 

That old screen door swung out and the doctor was gone with his head ducked low, chin to his chest and away. Granny came next with shimmering eyes and her lips pressed together. Leonard remembered that Devon screamed like _tearing_ and he thought she must have hurt herself. Her skinny arms were shaking when Granny hugged her and her fists were hard knobs of bone over skin just twisting as her mouth came open and all he could hear for hours was her screaming—long after it was over.

He stood up, a boy in striped pajamas and thermal socks feeling nothing at all and went in through the door, straight back, to the back room where his father kept his coat and maybe he took his big-old-never-washed coat because it smelled like wood smoke and sweat. It was too big and too heavy and Leonard felt like a baby wearing it as he climbed out through a window and ran until his legs turned to jelly under him.

So he cried there, with nothing but the trees and the bugs to hear him. Spilled a hundred-thousand-million tears into the sleeves of the coat hanging over his hands. He felt _torn_ and he felt _hurt_.

\--

He found out later her name was Jocelyn Rachel Woodley and she was originally from somewhere _not here_. One of those places up north where coats were something more than decorations and snow-boots weren’t just something you learned about in kindergarten and never wore. 

Mostly, he knew her as Jocelyn-that-girl-with-boobs and sometimes Jocelyn-that-bitch like they called her in the locker room after practice. But she was Jocelyn-the-saint-and-savior after every win. Coach never got the credit because it was his long-legged little girl with gum in her mouth and her hat on backward that beat his team into submission.

So Thursday, two days after they took his Daddy out of the house he was born in and squirreled him away to be turned back into ash like the Good Lord Intended (all caps, of course), when Leonard’s bones were almost solid instead of jelly—Jocelyn sighed when she looked at him.

“McCoy,” she said, hands on her hips and gum in a pocket of her cheek, “why are you here?”

“I play ball,” he said.

Devon had spit at him, one nasty-mean-twisted word after the other when he’d pulled his baseball uniform on. She’d called him heartless. She’d said he didn’t care about nothing but trophies and Granny had looked at him like she was dead herself and she didn’t _understand_ either but he had to play this game. 

Jocelyn nodded her head, “yeah.”

Yeah. He hugged her and neither of them knew why. Maybe she did—she was always smarter than him—maybe she didn’t. 

\--

Everything that Leonard _knew_ about love—true love, that kind that hit you low and hard and left you reeling and breathless—he learned at a funeral.

It was all wrong because he figured; years later when the realization came too late to be of any damn use to him, he’d spent half his childhood wrapped up in the kind of glowly-golden-love that all of Devon’s stupid love-sex-romance books couldn’t wrap themselves around. There was one constant in his life for those first seven years and that was—in all caps and italics with those pointy spikes of emphasis exploding from every damn angle:

_Daddy Loves Mommy_

.

Leonard watched them in the morning when he was sprawled across the end of their bed on his back with his footie pajamas on and his teddy bear clamped under his arm. (He was hungry, hungry, hungry—mama where’s my biscuits?) Daddy would put one hand on the headboard and the other on Mama’s cheek and he’d kiss her forehead and her nose and her lips until she smiled. The sun rose with his Mama’s smile.

 _Evy,_ Daddy said, _you better feed that boy before he eats the floorboards_. He’d kiss her again and he’d always-always-always say (I love you) and she’d kiss him one more time before he had to go. Then it’d be his Mama and him and that was all a little boy ever needed. She tickled his belly and up under his arms until they were standing side by side in front of the long counter with a bowl of biscuit dough between them.

Mama died under the stars—all at once—

Well, when everyone showed up wearing black and bearing big dishes of food like food would replace his Mama (because it wouldn’t—it wouldn’t—it never _ever_ would) his Daddy was sitting on the empty bed where he’d slept with his wife.

Someone said, (I’m surprised he didn’t die with her). Someone nodded and said, (I never met a man that loved his wife more). 

Leonard climbed the stairs and found his Daddy and crawled up to sit next to him. Daddy put his arm around him and Leonard wanted to crawl into his lap but he was _seven years old_. His Daddy never did ask him where his favorite-favorite teddy bear was so Leonard never did tell him that he buried it in the yard out by the trees because he _didn’t know why_ he’d done it.

They sat there, like that, both of them knowing that the sun wasn’t ever going to rise again.

That was love—

\--

It turned out; he was fifteen years old before he realized he was fourteen. Devon smacked him in the head for missing a year of his life and it was like waking up after being asleep forever.

There was some man at school asking him what he was going to do with the rest of his life while he flashed shiny badges and holographic videos about the wonder of Starfleet and the awesome power of the Federation. Leonard didn’t have much of anything he wanted to do with _space_ so he told that man no-thank-you and moved on with himself.

\--

Leonard met Yancy the way anyone meets one another. It was twice in the hallways, three times in the same class and all of a sudden he wasn’t going home after school because there was a clump of boys that got together in the clearing out beyond the baseball field to smoke funny cigarettes and tell stories about what girls looked like with their clothes off. 

He got real good at smoking those funny cigarettes—oh, he got damn good—and he could hold one pinched in his fingers while he shimmied up a tree with just his knees and his left hand ignoring the catcalls of the boys-wishing-they-were-men on the ground. He sprawled across tiny tree limbs and blew smoke at caterpillars in those trees. He talked about things he never told anyone when he had a few of those cigarettes in his pockets and one bleeding smoke through his veins.

Sometimes he thought he must be turning gray because he was smoking twice a week and he could always taste it on his tongue and between his fingers.

\--

“Get the fuck off my baseball team,” Jocelyn told him when he was Fifteen-and-Six-Months. Her hair wasn’t in pigtails anymore; it was pulled up in one single ponytail. Her breasts weren’t funny asymmetrical knobs under her shirt anymore but two pretty pillow-like mounds that stretched out her uniform and distracted him every time he tried to look at her face. “Now. Go. You’re worthless to me, McCoy—absolutely worthless.”

Leonard said: “I want to play.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you ran off with Yancy and the dumbasses. God, I don’t know what happened to you.” She shook her head like she was nothing but disappointed at him. Her hands were digging so hard into her hipbones over those stretched-tight white-blue-striped baseball pants. “We needed you,” she told him. Furious eyes. “Just _get out of here_.”

“But I want to play!” he shouted at her back when she left him standing there with his glove under his arm and the smell of cigarettes between his fingers. She was slipping through the fence and back into the game, leaving him behind and he _hated her_ so much it made his skin broil. “Bitch,” he spit at the ground and at her and maybe at himself.

\--

Granny rubbed his back when he puked straight through detoxing. (That was what it was called.) She washed his face and hummed sweet things to him while he dazed in and out on the couch and she rocked in her old chair knitting baby-booties for whoever had just had another baby this time. 

“If you had any sense,” she told him when the fever broke and left him soaked with slime-sweat, “you’d take up drinking like your Daddy and everyone before him. A little whiskey never hurt nobody.” 

\--

“You back?” Jocelyn asked him in the hallways of the school. She was wearing something that wasn’t white-with-stripes and he didn’t even recognize her. Her hair was hanging around her face and brushing wavy over her shoulders. She looked like a girl for the first time ever. 

“Yeah,” Leonard said, “I’m back.” 

So he was, out on that baseball field, running lap after lap because Jocelyn should have been the coach and her Daddy never once told her to stop torturing those boys. He ran because Jocelyn was the only one that looked at him like she _expected_ something from him. Not what the teachers wanted—good grades and life plan. Not what Granny wanted—just be a good boy, Leonard. 

Damn if he ever figured it out, but at fifteen with the afternoon wind blowing up his nose and through his hair, Leonard needed someone to expect more of him than he expected of himself. 

He ran for her. 

\--

“Saturday,” Jocelyn told him when they were both sixteen. 

Saturday was ATVs in the field out behind the old Barrowman’s place. She put him on the bitch seat because he hadn’t ever driven one before and she showed him what crazy girls born-up-north were really like. 

Oh she spun him in circles—inside, outside, upside _down_ and his heart had never beat so fast and he’d never shouted so loud. Then she slid off to one side, and he got to drive with her skinny arms and her curvy body against his back. The thing vibrated under him, in his fists when he revved the engine. 

The wind in his hair and her giggles and shrieks in his ear and he could have driven them _forever_. 

\--

“So,” she said when they were collapsed on the grass with her hair like a fan around her head, “what are you going to do after school?”

The counselors at school were demanding answers and life-plans. Leonard sat with his back against the still-hot ATV and shrugged his shoulders. “I guess I hadn’t ever really thought about it too much. I wanted to be a doctor once.”

Jocelyn rolled onto her side with her face resting on her palm. “You don’t now?” 

“I don’t know,” he said because he didn’t. Right then, with her white t-shirt stained with dirt and half up and off her belly and her long-long-golden skinned legs all but naked because her shorts were that short, all he really wanted was the courage to ask her if he could kiss her. “Do you know?”

“No,” she said.

\--

Telling the counselor he wanted to be a doctor was half an accident and half an attempt to get the excitable little old woman off his back. He didn’t mean for it to end with twice as many classes and subjects he didn’t really care much about. Suddenly he was out of average-every-day English and that one biology class and up to his nose in anatomy, physiology and advanced mathematics. 

Start human, the teacher said, we’ll get to the others next semester.

Leonard felt weighed down and used up after two weeks. Just about ready to haul his tired ass to the counselor and tell her (I quit, I can’t do this). Jocelyn found him on the baseball field, halfway through his second lap and she jogged at his side in silence for a minute.

“So,” she said, “you’re going to be a doctor, then?”

“Guess I am,” he answered.

“Do doctors get free Saturdays?”

Leonard looked at her sideways while he ran and she was staring straight ahead like that wasn’t some kind of proposition. He was half-hard with half-thought ideas about grass and her legs and how he wanted to touch her hair and kiss her lips. She probably tasted like gum because she always smelled like it but it wasn’t such a bad taste. “No,” he said because it was the truth. Then when she frowned between her eyebrows and around her lips. “Unless you want to help me study anatomy.”

She knocked into him so hard he fell face-first in the dirt. It wasn’t such a bad way to look at her, staring up her body from down there. “Smooth,” she told him.

Leonard smiled because she was laughing.

“Saturday,” she said.

He just might have spent the whole rest of the week masturbating. She knew—or else she smiled at him like she knew.

\--

Saturdays became Saturdays and Wednesdays after school. They ran the ATV until it was hot and cranky. They sat in the dirt with his books and she leaned against his arm and called him names while she taught him _advanced mathematics_. She took the text books and sat on the ground while he climbed trees and he gave her definitions for words until he knew them as well as he knew the feeling of bark and the smell of leaves.

He asked her, on a Wednesday, when it was raining: “what are you going to do?”

Her hair was half-in, half-out of a pony tail and she just shrugged on his porch while she watched the water dripping off the roof. “Do you think your Granny would have herself a heart attack if we went to your room?”

Leonard was pretty sure that he was going to have a heart attack. “No,” he said. He dragged his bag up and took her hand and showed her the way through his quite-cold old house. Up the stairs and to the right, around the banister and into his bedroom. Jocelyn looked out of place with the left over trappings of his boyhood. She was tall, blonde and a real-live woman standing next to his toys and half-finished dreams.

“So,” he said when the door closed.

“Lions?” she asked when she sat on his bed and ran her hand across his pillowcase. 

Leonard must have been red from blushing. He sat next to her and it was _just like that_. She was kissing him and it was dry with a dampness right at the edges. He twisted around to touch her hair and licked his lips and they did it _right_ the second time.

It was all wet-wet-wet. She was touching his face and his neck and his shoulders with tentative butterfly-fingertips like she always wanted to and never thought she could. He was hard and hoping she wouldn’t notice and wondering if she wanted him that same way. Her mouth opened against his and her tongue tasted just like bubblegum.

“Wow,” she said when the kissing stopped and she was sitting back to look at him. Her eyes were all over his lap and he reached passed her to get the pillow not because he was embarrassed but because she was _staring_.

Her smile told him she knew his every secret.

\--

Leonard fell in love with Jocelyn in those moments between. He loved kissing her and when Saturdays were nothing but the ATV sitting forgotten and her on her back with a blanket underneath her and him over her with both hands under her shirt—oh boy—he loved that too. He loved her skin, he loved her tongue, and he loved the hitch of her breath. 

He loved her _thighs_ when they pressed against his hips and they were wasting time mimicking that sex thing. He got real good at making sure they never got too close and she tried to suck on his tongue and his neck and tickle her hands down his back and his chest until he came in his pants because she was _evil_ and he loved her for it. (Even if Granny was giving him more sideways glances every day and he was running out of ways to avoid her.)

But he fell in love with her—real love that happened up in his heart and not down between his legs—in those minutes between this and that. When she was out on the pitcher’s mound with the ball in her long fingers and a sneaky grin on her face saying _oh no you can’t hit this_ but he could and she knew it.

When she sat at lunch with her pinkies sticking out around the chicken sandwich and talked big-tall dreams about the world-out-there beyond the edges of this tiny town. Jocelyn saw stars and starships and Leonard saw her eyes and her pointy pinkies.

All at once, at just-about-seventeen he found himself daydreaming about the rest of his life with her. A spill of open textbooks and a half-finished essay for a scholarship he didn’t give a damn if he got or not. Oh, no, he wanted _her_ now and then and just _forever_.

\--

Everything he knew about sex he learned from Jocelyn. 

Her fingers in his hair and her body beneath his. Her skin was warm like the sun. Her breathes were little hitches and catches that left him feeling dizzy and she whimpered his name like it _hurt_ but he knew that it didn’t. 

They’d worked their way up to this, his hands under her shirt and then down her pants and finally she had wriggled out of her panties under one of those knee-length skirts she started wearing. Her fingers over his and she showed him just exactly how she liked it—right there and go this fast and don’t-hurry-take-your-time. Then it was long kisses down her chest, his tongue on her nipples while she bit her lip and didn’t look too convinced. She liked kisses on her belly and his hands on her thighs.

When he used his tongue—and he got real good at that—she couldn’t hold still and he loved that better than anything else.

It was after Halloween, before deadlines and she was in his bedroom looking at his half-finished essay. (Finish it, Leonard.) She promised without saying it, if he got all his essays and applications done that she’d let him have sex with her. The whole way and all of it—not her warm palm or her curious tongue but the whole thing. 

Leonard demanded receipts from the bewildered counselor when he turned his applications in. She wrote him up a slip of something and handed it to him and he carried it straight to Jocelyn who just _laughed at him_.

“Oh boy,” she said with a sparkle in her eyes, “you are something else.”

\--

They had sex in his bedroom, early in the afternoon when Devon and Granny were gone off to see whatever new baby had just been born. Jocelyn was naked against his sheets and he felt like he was going to explode everywhere all at once in every damn direction. Her fingernails bit into his shoulders and she didn’t kiss him when he was inside of her.

He couldn’t have kissed her anyway—could barely breathe or see or hear so mastering enough coordination to keep himself from crushing her and kissing her all at once was nothing he was qualified to do. It was just about the best damn thing he’d done in his entire life—forget smoking—and she was crying pretty pearl tears at the corner of her eyes. 

“Joss?” he gulped.

“It’s alright,” she told him with her palms going down his back and her quivering legs around his hips. “It’s alright.” 

“I love you,” he told her and he meant it—oh he meant it in every way and not just the way boys meant it when all they wanted was this. (He would have loved her if she spent the rest of her life laughing at him.)

“I love you,” she said back and showed him how to move his hips just like she wanted. 

\--

After, they lay on his bed with the blankets off. He moved first and she smiled at him even if he knew he’d hurt her.

“All the girls are going to be asking about this, you know,” Jocelyn told him.

He kissed her shoulder because it was golden and pink underneath where the blush was still fading. His hand was broad across her flat belly as they shifted toward one another like gravity. “Yeah? What are you going to tell them?” He kissed his way over to her neck. “I’m real big and real good, right?”

“Oh no,” Jocelyn assured him with her hand on the back of his forearm. “Maybe something like—he’s so small I couldn’t even find it and I think I’d rather get my teeth drilled.” Her giggle was a fiendish slap as she smiled at him like he was staring at her (with his heart and his reputation shattering to pieces behind him). “That way,” she said, “nobody else will ever want you and you’ll be all mine.”

\--

By graduation they’d worked it out and they were fucking once a day, after school or before. She left her window open and he climbed up the side of her house and into her bedroom. She always hissed (shhh) at him because her parents were alive and sleeping in the room down the hall.

She pinned him to his desk chair and they had sex with all their clothes on save her pale-yellow panties caught around her left knee. 

He pulled her by the hand into the empty-abandoned locker room and got on his knees for her because he had a test during his last period and she was his good-luck charm. 

\--

Granny asked him when he was going to make an honest woman of Jocelyn. Devon had watercolor dreams of babies and as far as Leonard was concerned, Devon could have her own damn babies if she wanted them because he was _eighteen fucking years old_ and he didn’t want no damn babies.

Jocelyn put her hands on her hips and said: “Leonard H. McCoy if you don’t fucking accept this scholarship I’ll never fuck you again—do you understand me?”

Yes ma’am, he certainly did. He was in the counselor’s office raising her blood pressure because he needed to accept that scholarship to Ole Miss right now and he needed a receipt for it too. She showed him how to do it and he thanked her. It didn’t make much difference to him that he was going to be leaving home—good bye Georgia and hello Mississippi. 

It mattered that Jocelyn laughed at him when he gave her the receipt but she took her clothes off for him.

\--

“I’m not going without you!” Leonard shouted at her, across her front porch while he Mommy-Daddy-baby brother gawked from their kitchen. “Damn it, Joss. I’m not. I wouldn’t even be going if you hadn’t—I’m not leaving you.”

“What if I don’t want to go!” she shouted back, “maybe I’ve got plans of my own that don’t include following you around a university and teaching you goddamn alien biology! _I_ could be a doctor.”

“Then why aren’t you?” he demanded. 

“Because I don’t want to be! And I don’t want to go to Mississippi with you either so just go. Get out of here.” She had one hand on her hip and the other pointing her finger away-that-way-anywhere but where she was. Like she meant it, like she meant any of it.

He kissed her with everything he had in his body, with the quiver-shiver-shake of fear that she meant it this time. With the tremble of love and his whole damn soul because he couldn’t (could _not_ ) do this without her. She punched his arm and scratched his neck and melted against him.

She was whispering _I’m sorry, Leonard, I’m sorry_ and he was saying _I love you, Joss_.

At eighteen his whole world was wrapped up in her body.

At twenty eight, he couldn’t figure out why he didn’t leave her on that porch.

\--

 ** _side b: sinking ship_**  
Jim met his father for the first time when he was almost but not quite five yet. He found him lost with the dust bunnies under his mother’s always-empty bed. The whole thing was an accident because Jim hadn’t ever gone looking for his father before. All his life was filled to bursting with the places that his father was not _anymore_.

His father _was not_ at the breakfast table when Grandpa Tiberius smiled at Sam-the-clever-nine-year-old and said things like _you’re just like your father_ like it meant something. Sam would wiggle in his seat and Grandma Laura would nod her head once-twice and then get tears in her eyes.

His father wasn’t in the long hall upstairs when Jim ran one end to the other with his arms over his head and _screamed_ as loud as he could because there was nothing better to do and nobody to tell him not to. His father wasn’t there when Grandma Laura finally came up looking gray and tight and made him stand in the corner because _she never_ and he was his _mother’s son_ one hundred _per_ cent.

His father wasn’t outside in the cold-crisp-biting air with Uncle Sam (and not little Sam) who seemed to understand that Jim was too big for little boy-britches and treated him like he was a little man. They sat on the bench on the front porch with their legs stretched in front of them, slouching like men and arms over their chests. Sam smoked sometimes and Jim pretended now and again. Sam said: _you’ll never know, will you kid?_ like it meant something.

His father wasn’t in the picture frames in the hall that changed every ten minutes. Not even in the one that flashed a face that looked a lot like Sam’s from a bare-butted baby to a grinning man in dress clothes hugging some woman that looked like Jim’s mother. 

No, Jim never went looking. He found his father all on accident.

\--

“Your mother’s coming home.”

Grandma Laura always said it like it was something she was sorry for having to admit. Like the time she cut the top of Jim’s ears when she was cutting his hair or when Grandpa Tiberius punished Sam for letting the horses get out. Jim didn’t much care—he knocked things over, stole cookies and dropped his baseball into the downstairs toilet and his softball into the upstairs one. He flushed them until there was water on the floor and took his pocket of cookies upstairs to his mother’s empty room. His socks and pant legs were soaked-wet as he crawled under her bed with the cobwebs and dust bunnies and ate dirty cookies until his belly hurt.

He found his father there while Grandma Laura shrieked downstairs and Grandpa Tiberius roared. There was a clink-clank-swish-slop of fixing and cleaning. 

Jim rolled onto his belly and found the wooden box with the flowers carved into the top. He cracked it up with pudgy-sticky-brown-streaked fingers and stared at the data chips inside. They could have been pictures or videos or spreadsheets. He fisted them in his hands, shoved them into his pockets and wiggled out from under the bed.

It was out of that room, down to his bedroom and climbing up onto Sam’s bed with the viewer tight against his chest. Under the blanket and stuffing the chips into the slot one after the other—

His father was there, living and breathing, smiling broad smiles as he talked loud and bright to some woman that looked a lot like Jim’s Mama. Or being quiet—so quiet—as he rocked some pink little baby to sleep while he whispered sweet things that sounded like rules to Jim. Or standing tall with tears in his eyes (and that didn’t make no sense, he didn’t look hurt) while he stared at that strange glowing woman that must have been Jim’s mother.

So that was his father. Jim never gave him back.

\--

 

Grandpa Tiberius never _spanked_ anyone. No, he sat you at the table and looked at you with a tired-old-man’s eyes and he said things like:

_we’re not angry at you…_

Only Jim knew that was a lie. If they weren’t angry then he wouldn’t be sitting at this table squirming in his seat while Grandpa Tiberius stared at him and Grandma Laura looked nervous and apologetic. Only she never looked as sad when he got in trouble as she did when Sam got into it. 

Jim figured, sure—that made sense—Sam was a clever ten-year-old when Jim was still a big-headed-five-year-old. Sam was his father’s son and Jim was that boy that had his mother’s eyes and couldn’t sit still in church on Sundays.

\--

“ _Laura_ ,” his mother said to Grandma after five years were gone and Jim was nine and still nowhere as clever as Sam. 

Jim knew they were fighting about him. He wasn’t sure what it was about this time—he’d done everything they told him to do. He did his chores and he did his homework and he got good grades and he didn’t fight with anyone. So he never ate any of his vegetables and he really didn’t care if he memorized Bible passages when he could read those books in his mother’s empty room that looked like they belonged to Starfleet’s Academy. 

“Leave the boy alone,” his mother said.

“He needs direction,” Grandma Laura said (again).

His mother scraped the chair across the floor as she stood up. She was tall and beaten and angry at his brittle old grandmother. “You already got Sam,” she hissed at Grandma Laura, “you don’t get Jim too.” 

Whatever that meant, he didn’t figure it out because he was tip-toeing up the steps on socked feet while he held his breath and hoped he didn’t get caught. Two hours bled past while he laid on his bed and tried to work it out, tried to figure out what Sam did that he didn’t while he counted seconds and wished (hoped, prayed) that his Mother would come see him.

She never did come.

She wasn’t at dinner.

Grandma Laura didn’t look at him either.

\--

So, Jim met Frank and he hated him as soon as he saw him. His mother didn’t like him too much either but all of a sudden and fresh out of _nowhere_ they were getting _married_. That didn’t matter much other than making Sam angry.

Uncle Sam too—oh, Uncle Sam was spitting mad as he screamed things at Jim’s mother out in the yard. He couldn’t understand what they were shouting but he knew that his Mother was the meanest woman he’d ever seen and nobody had ever made Uncle Sam hang his head like that before. 

Years later, he’d think that was about the last time he ever saw Uncle Sam but it didn’t matter much. That night he hid all the data chips of his father in his own little box and stuffed it at the bottom of his suitcase.

“This is stupid,” Sam said, “we should stay _here_.”

Jim didn’t see the difference but he didn’t say so.

\--

The thing was—when his Mother wasn’t around, Frank did spank them. The first time it stole all of Jim’s breath and all of his thoughts and left him stinging with pain and hollow all inside of himself where it really mattered. He sat on the dusty stairs with his mouth hanging open and--

Nothing.

\--

Sam hated him because Jim didn’t want to get hit. 

He was ten years old and no boy wanted to get a beating for misbehaving. Sam didn’t understand it, Sam didn’t _adapt_ to fit the changing circumstances. Sam kept right on going with an offensive bullheaded determination to get himself beaten as often as he could. When it wasn’t mouthing off just because he was some cock-sure fifteen year old _bastard_ it was leaving the chores undone and spilling grease in Frank’s garage.

When Sam was red and hurting from getting his _ass whipped_ , he would push Jim and he would call him names and tell him that he never fought for anything. 

“You just give up,” Sam said through a snotty nose and clenched teeth.

But it wasn’t until: “ _You_ are _just like Mom_ ,” that Jim felt his chest get tight-hot-twisting and then explode. He kicked Sam as hard as he could, on the shins and ankles and beat on his stomach and chest and screamed at him for being an idiot and a fool and _wanting_ to get hurt and blaming _Jim_ when it wasn’t his fault.

Then Frank was in their room demanding what the noise was and looking at Sam’s bloody nose and Jim got _his ass_ whipped.

\--

Jim went the way of the car. When he pulled himself up off that cliff—heartbeat in his throat and the whole _entire_ world of possibility spread before him like a cavern he could never jump—he dusted off his childhood and lifted his head and called himself _Kirk_.

Kirk wasn’t afraid of Frank. Kirk didn’t care that Sam had packed his bag and walked out the door with a: “I’m going back to Grandpa’s,” and no invitation for Kirk to join. Kirk had never loved his mother anyway so fuck her if she sometimes forgot to send him a birthday card until the month after.

That night, when Frank was furious and ready to beat-his-ass, Kirk cocked his head to one side and stared right back at him. He was nothing but a boy but he knew something now—he’d taken something that Frank wanted and he destroyed it. 

So this, this pink-flushed-shiver of fury that made Frank’s words slip one over the other until they were all a big jumble of nothing but verbal puke—this was a thrill down Kirk’s spine that left him with a Cheshire-grin he couldn’t hide. He put his hands on his hips and he stared Frank down.

And he got his beating, but that didn’t matter. Because he’d _won_ and they both knew it.

\--

Grandpa Tiberius called once (but not twice) and asked him twice (and not once) if he wanted to come home. Jim was standing, not sitting, as he stared blankly at the screen mounted into the wall. There wasn’t a picture and maybe that was better for everyone because he wasn’t too sure what he might have said if he was staring the man in the face.

(Come save me.)

He listened to those things that Grandpa Tiberius didn’t say to him—how he didn’t say (we’re coming to get you son) and he never-ever-once-said (you’re just like your father, son). He said _are you sure_ like any twelve year old boy had ever been sure of a thing in his life. Kirk said: “Yes, sir,” like he knew what the words meant.

That house—Grandpa Tiberius’s house—was filled with places his father wasn’t. It was overflowing with things that Jim never was going to be. He wasn’t much now but he was halfway to knowing how to take care of himself and that was a damn shot better than anything Grandpa Tiberius had ever offered him with long stares across a round table saying: 

“ _We’re not angry, son, we’re just disappointed_.”

Because Kirk was never going to be _George Kirk_ no matter what he did. 

\--

Five years ended with his mother dropping her stiff-cased-bag on the floor of the front room. There was trash spread across the room. Cans of grease, old rags—paper—and torn cushions. 

It went like this sometimes—Kirk didn’t wash the clothes (make sure you get those stains out _Jim_ mee) or got-in-a-fight-at-school and good ol’Frank didn’t like that so it was (bring me the belt, Jim _mee_ ) and the next day when he was breaking-his-back-to-provide-for-you-you- _ungrateful-little-_ shit, Kirk would break things. It made sense to him.

There was perfect symmetry and he planned it real careful while he waited for the burn and sting to fade. Every little thing he was going to break from the garage to the upstairs-bathroom. He stood in his room until the front door closed and he untangled himself little piece by little piece until it was all a rage and every tear he had squeezed back was a shriek of fury that burst open and _destroyed_ anything it could touch.

So this time, with his fist around the back of the couch like he could strangle it into _understanding_ that he was just _fourteen fucking years old_ and he shouldn’t _be here_ but he didn’t _belong there_ either—it was his mother that found him.

He looked at her and she looked at him.

For a minute, just for that minute—maybe—he thought that the couch might never get it, but his mother understood _exactly_. She didn’t yell at him and she didn’t demand to know what he was doing. She shook the strap of the bag off her arm and she tipped her head to see the knife in his hand. 

She didn’t say _does he deserve it_. She didn’t call him _little shit_ as she kept her place right where she was.

He didn’t much understand what the _fuck_ she had to cry about (he didn’t know why the hell his own chest burned like he wanted to cry too) but there were tears over her lashes as her arms hung at her sides helplessly. 

She did say: “Why?” when he ran the knife from one corner of the couch’s back to the other. 

He shrugged his left shoulder but not the right because he was ripping the guts of the couch out while his head spun in erratic circles leaving him (deaf and dumb and blind but it still always—always-- _hurt_ ) feeling a little crazy and a little too loose. He could fly right now, he could fly right the fuck out of _here_. “Because,” he said with his heart in his throat just pounding, “fuck him.”

\--

At first, he thought, she was going to ask him what he meant but she didn’t. There were no questions (nobody ever asked) only her silence as she crossed the room to where the stool stood by the wall. She was next to it, not on it. 

He thought, as he cut open the cushions and turned them over so the foam pellets fell like snow—pretty, white—to the ground, that she might make excuses. She might say (I didn’t know) or (he never told me) or demand (why didn’t you) but she had to know. Maybe she had (maybe she didn’t care). 

What she did, carelessly, like it didn’t matter to her at all—like it was nothing and it was just _ok_ was reach out her hand and sweep it across the shelf of shot glasses that Frank had collected _for years Jim-_ mee _and if you break one its_ your ass. They hit the ground with a broken symphony.

He didn’t say (thank you) but his whole body screamed it as he picked up an empty bottle from the ground and threw it at the wall—over the fancy frames filled with Frank’s-fucking-family (that’s aunt _Mare_ -ee). They shattered with sparks and fizzed and burned with leftover beer.

Kirk was going to tear the whole house down—the whole fucking house.

\--

For a long time, Kirk hated his mother. He’d decided back when it seemed like he needed to know one way or the other, that he was going to hate her. It was hard to hate a ghost and harder to hate a figment but he hated her all the same. 

\--

“When’s the last time you ate something?” she asked him like he wasn’t sitting on his ass in foam, one foot on the overturned coffee table and the other throw up across the arm of the couch. He had his jeans hiked up because they were too long and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows because they were too loose. “You’re like a stick.”

Her boots made strange music across the broken glass. The refrigerator jingled when she opened it. There was plenty of food in there (Frank’s food) but nothing that she wanted to eat going by the curl of her lip.

He didn’t say and she didn’t want to know anyway. Her boots crossed broken glass again and stepped out of the way of the grease-beer-toilet-water puddle. She picked up her bag before it got caught in the flood. 

“Go get your stuff,” she said.

\--

He wasn’t proud of himself. There was foam under his fingernails and beer soaking into his pant legs. He wasn’t proud of any damn thing but (fuck that) because he had won this time.

Kirk heard the door open-whine-slam. He had the sound of Frank’s footsteps memorized like the rhythm of his own heartbeat. At fourteen he couldn’t still the shake of his sloppy fingers, couldn’t queel the urge in his gut that whispered (fast, fast, hurry now) until he wasn’t choosing and stuffing but grab-shove and leave-now. He scooped the box he kept his father in up under his arm with two books he wanted to keep.

Anything else, that frantic (thump-thump-thump) of his heart said, could fucking well stay. So it did.

Just, this time, he wasn’t.

\--

“—the fuck!” was Frank’s shout. 

(Kirk wasn’t proud.)

Threats came next, boots through water. He thought he heard his mother say something like the whispered hiss of a snake. He thought he heard Frank’s meaty-mouth opening (like a wet _pop_ and a _slurp_ ) but there was no sound to it. Kirk was on the sixth stair with more to go and there was a slam of meat against wood with bone impacting.

Wheeze—choke—and Kirk was jumping, hitting the ground on one foot and one knee, dropping everything he was holding because (he hated her) fuck if Frank was going to _touch_ his mother. 

There she was, his mother—strange woman—all in a lean with the flat of her elbow crushing over Frank’s throat while his eyes bulged out and his face went funny colors. His hand was twisted around her arm and the other was on her neck. She was _vicious_ and she was _mean_ and she didn’t damn well care that her own life was being squeezed tight-tight-tighter right out of her throat.

No, she never blinked but she brought her knee up and Frank screeched something like vomit in the air and there was something that (popped) sounded like it must have just about killed him. His mother’s head was tipped just a little to one side and her words were low-hissing: “you hurt my boy.”

He would have loved her if she weren’t five years too late.

\--

They sat around a tall table on hotel chairs with a platter of spaghetti dished out between two plates. Kirk ate like he hadn’t ate in days and his mother sat across from him twirling her spaghetti around her fork without even licking the sauce off the back of her knuckle.

“Do you want to go back to your grandfather’s farm?” she asked him.

Kirk slurped his milk and wiped his face on his shirt sleeve and sat back in the hard hotel chair. He eyed this woman that had eyes like his. She eyed him back until he had to look to the side-down-at the carpet. “No,” he said. (He thought of Sam, because Sam was clever and smart and sturdy like their father. Sam was quiet and sincere and _thoughtful_ and that was exactly what Grandpa thought he wanted.)

His mother nodded once. “Jim,” she started and then stopped. Maybe she just didn’t have any idea how to talk to him like he didn’t have any idea how to talk to her. She looked at him and she saw the same nothing he saw in her. “Don’t give up,” she finished.

“Sure,” he agreed.

\--

The solution—her solution, not his solution, because his solution involved starships and far-the-fuck-away-from here—was to buy him somewhere to live. So there he was at fourteen with nothing but two shirts, two pairs of pants, one set of shoes and a single sock with a ratty little apartment. 

“It’s not much,” she said when she brought him sheets, blankets and pans. “It’s yours.”

So it was. Jim could appreciate that even if he was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. “Another five years?” he asked her. He decided to call her Winona because she wasn’t so bad if she wasn’t his mother. 

Winona nodded and reached into her pocket and pulled out a card that gave him access to his own account and she told him important things about how she had set up the rent to come directly out of the account and there’d be some left over for food and clothes and whatever he needed. She didn’t smile when she told him he might want to get a job (he didn’t tell her he was too young) but she hugged him like they knew one another.

He hugged her because it always felt like he’d waited all his life to hug her back. 

“Don’t give up, Jim,” she said into the hug.

\--

That news spread fast, all around school, that Kirk kid lived alone. All the kids thought he was lucky (and cool) and they all wanted to be his friend because he was the one that lived (without parents) alone. Alone was where stupid kids like jocks-in-jock-jackets and girls-in-cheerleader-skirts did things to one another that Kirk hadn’t had the time or inclination to care about. Alone bred long thoughts about long nights and short thoughts about sunrises that were yellow in his eyes and (deafening) silent all around him.

He was numb.

His teachers were _concerned_ but Winona had straightened that out. She had _straightened_ everything right out so it lay flat. Kirk got long-sideways-glances like there was someone that thought they should care enough to say (he’s only a kid) and then there were mean stares and teeth-on-lips that wanted to call him (a bad kid).

Sooner or later, he stopped seeing them.

\--

At fifteen he was tall and not particularly big. (Just stupid.)

Fights were hard to win when you were a twig that got tossed against lockers and dropped on the floor. Sometimes, the principal (he wasn’t so bad) asked him why he didn’t just _stop fighting_ when Kirk leaned back in that familiar chair across the desk and steepled his fingers just to be mocking and asked:

“You know how I can get more muscle?”

Mr. Wardor told him to join a sport, told him he could run track or place baseball or basketball or anything. Mr. Wardor wanted him to _connect to people_ because he was _worried_ , see, that Kirk was alone too much.

(Yellow static—that was alone.)

Kirk would nod and look over-there-out-that-window to where the kids were throwing round and oval balls at one another like it meant something. He thought (he could do that) it didn’t look particularly exciting. He decided he _didn’t have time_ to waste like that. He would smile on the one side because Mr. Wardor went a little stiff like he _hated it_ and he said: 

“I like boxing.”

The school nurse would slap an ice-pack to his face and send him out of the office because she had given up two semesters ago and she _didn’t have time_ either. So nobody had time, but he had an all purpose pass to the library that taught him how to make magic-potions that tasted like feet and worked like a charm. And how to build his own set of weights out of not much of anything.

It gave him something to do—for a little while, at least.

\--

The first car he stole was because he thought that he could. He took it for a little joyride and put it right back where he got it more (or less) in the same condition he’d taken it. 

The second car he stole was because he _knew_ he could and he drove it clear out of town and parked it at a bar. Inside it was hot-moist-thick with the promise of dirty-bad and everything was hops, barley and exotic sweat. He stood at the bar until the man behind it told him to get lost because there was no way he was old enough to drink.

( _Sure am, man, sure am—I live_ alone.)

But there was a woman that purred at him and poured liquor down his throat until he was stupid-drunk and she had her hands all over him. He smiled at her, crooked, sloppy and she _purred_. “You want me?” he asked her at fifteen and almost eleven months. Sex was that (other) thing he didn’t think about too much but she was all _over him_.

“Oh yes,” she mewled into his mouth before her tongue was in his mouth. It went like that—to the bathroom, against the metal stall, her hand in his pants and his hands clutching the top where it was corroded and red until his palms came away gritty. She showed him how to fuck her _hard_ and _fast_ and she loved it _just like that_.

\--

Sixteen meant he was _too smart_ how some people said it and _directionless_ how others did. 

Sixteen was fifteen with a year tacked on—he found himself staring into the lazy dance of yellow static through the window until his eyes were aching from the little catches of dust in the light. He’d decided, last year or this one, sometime after his birthday—after Winona sent him a card and a yearly bonus and told him (get some clothes, kid) that it wasn’t _alone_ anymore but _solitude_.

But he was smart enough to know it wasn’t anything but another name for the fact that (nobody gave a fuck) he was by himself. All alone, with nobody else, he was smart enough to get bored about stealing cars and taking them back—he was bored about stealing cars and leaving them _somewhere else_. 

He was bored enough that he started breaking into all-night-all-day carwashes after midnight and washing stolen cars. Bored enough that any security system was nothing but a fun game and he only had to find one little crack and he was in—so he took his library card and he found himself a dozen books or so about programming and he set to work learning a new trade.

\--

It wasn’t exactly a revelation and it wasn’t no damn shock to him (or anyone really) when he finally decided he didn’t need to go to school. Not every day, just once or twice when the weather was lousy and there wasn’t anything better to do anyway. Halfway through the library and there wasn’t anything that building with the bricks and the long-sighing school teachers had to teach him he hadn’t already figured out on his own.

(Boy has a big brain.)

Grandpa Tiberius called him once—on a Thursday after eleven but before three and asked him if he was sick because _that school was calling again_ and Kirk told him he was fine just he didn’t feel like going that day. 

Sam—clever, smart, _sturdy_ Sam—was off on his way toward being some genius researcher and he was going to go _into space_ but that was just fine. Kirk was going to go _to the bar_ and they could compare notes at the end about who knew what about life.

\--

Some man in a black shirt stopped him on his way to class and demanded to know if he wanted to make something of his life. He flashed Starfleet Academy recruiting buttons at him and Kirk hit him. Not for any reason—just that his muscles were all on hair triggers left over from yesterday’s fight and yesterday’s hard liquor and any sudden moves mean you had to react _now_ and think later.

So, that was the first time he got arrested.

\--

Life broke down like this:

Monday he went to school so he could say that he did. He sat in all his classes, he listened to all his teachers. He smiled at all the pretty girls that were just starting to notice he carried bruises like battle scars and he was (dangerous and) exciting. Pretty girls in _past_ el _pin_ k got all wet between the legs about boys like him and the jocks with the fancy jock-jackets hated him for it.

Tuesday he woke up on time and lay in bed and thought about going to school. He never did make it out of bed before maybe 11, (maybe 3), on Tuesdays. He spent most of the day reading over the books he took from the library. It didn’t matter what they were because he wasn’t picky. Lying on his back on the bed with his feet on the wall, he read all day until the light was dark and his stomach was eating itself.

Wednesday he made it to maybe one class. He found a jock that thought he was hot-shit and he taunted him a little, smirked at him and slapped his face and started a fight. He practiced things he’d learned in the _last fight_ and learned a few new things. Sometimes he experimented but mostly he ended up in the principal’s office.

Mr. Wardor called him _James_ and Kirk asked him how his wife was doing. They discussed ancient literature and modern politics until the last bell rang. Mr. Wardor invited him over for dinner and told him to stop fighting in the halls. Kirk always promised that he’d try and he never did.

Thursday he found himself a bar that didn’t call the cops on him _right away_ and sat in a booth at the corner to watch people. They came and went all day but when the sky got dark the room got filled. The smell was rich, amber and blood-thick. He found pretty women with slippery fingers that liked the way he smiled and didn’t care enough that he was just a little boy. With them—here or there or on their fluffy white beds—he was a tall, grown up man. 

(He just felt like he was pretending something.)

Fridays he took tests if there were any to take. He stole cars or candy bars depending on whether or not he was feeling up to it. He walked around town watching people—he started fights and talked his way out of them unless he found someone with a high blood pressure that called for the cops right away instead of playing along.

Saturdays he slept until the sun was down and he found himself a brawl. All the best brawls started on Saturday nights. There were men that would bet him he couldn’t win a fight and he came home with pockets full of credits. A few weeks of that and he’d bought himself a nice little couch and a deck of cards.

He taught himself to play poker on Sundays because _fuck God_ and he never thought of Grandma Laura or Grandpa Tiberius either.

\--

 _His_ name was Rhett and he was all dark. Pitch-black hair over white skin and black eyes. Kirk didn’t know what the fuck he was doing when he licked his lips and nodded his head. Just that he was seventeen and there were things he hadn’t learned about his own body yet.

Rhett fucked him in the back of a car, breathing hot-beer-wet breath against the nape of his neck and leaving marks on his hips as he thrust into his body again-and-again. Kirk pushed his hand against the glass window because it was the only thing that wasn’t blistering hot and hung his head because he couldn’t find air to breath. 

When it was done and his ass was stinging while the rest of his body buzzed with something unfamiliar and not entirely pleasant, Rhett smacked his hip and told him he wasn’t half bad but he’d be better with practice. 

Kirk started that fight and finished it too and when he drove the stupid bastard to the emergency room he made sure his buddy, Frances was the cop on duty to come pick him up. Frances was alright because he always made hot coffee and gave Kirk the good cell and the clean blankets while he did his twenty-four hours.

“Kid,” Frances said every single time, “we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

\--

Sometimes, after he got a letter from his mother that said confusing things about how proud she was (of what) and reminded him (don’t give up) not to lose, he would pull out his box and watch the old holograms of his father. Once in a while he felt like finding something to break just so he could make sense of it.

(But _that_ , well that _never worked_ —all those broken things littering his floor and not a single one made sense to him.)

Now and again he found himself looking up the Kelvin, reading over the incident anywhere he could find an article about it. He read long passages about the aftermath that had words like ‘his widow’ and ‘the sons he left behind’. Kirk tried hard to hate his father like he had decided to hate his mother before he figured she was _just Winona_ and left it at that.

He couldn’t hate him. (Nobody could—and nobody was whole because George—ol’ _Georgie_ , he took half of everyone with him when he went.) Kirk sat slouched against the wall with a worthless diploma on one side and absolutely nothing on the other and watched the hologram movies play on the viewer balanced on his belly. 

He loved his father because he thought (he had to love someone or), (I want to be like that), if his father had lived (everyone else would have died)—oh, boy, if his father had lived.

\--


	2. a still (verdictless) life/search and destroy

02.  
 ** _side a: a still (verdictless) life_**  
At first, there was always hot coffee or hot tea with fresh baked breakfast in the morning. There were long kisses (oh I missed you) and desperate hugs in the afternoons or late-late at night when he finally dragged himself home. In the short hours between this class and _that_ one there were steaming bubble baths and Jocelyn’s voice telling him all about the things she seen or read or done that day.

Her dreams were little things about flowers in the park or a nice lady she met at the market. Leonard would tip his head back—soaked in heat and love and the certainty that everything was fine-just-fine—and close his eyes. He followed her out on her aimless path while she talked. He stroked her belly and her ribs below her breasts and he thought that life was never-ever going to get better than this.

Maybe he always loved her best in those moments between.

\--

The first time he got asked (want to get a drink) he said he couldn’t because he had a girl waiting for him back at home and she got lonely. Only he didn’t say (she got lonely) and they didn’t mock him for being (whipped) a family man. Maybe there was something envious in their lonely freshman eyes about how he had brought his very own true love with him and they were running bar-to-bar trying to find theirs. 

Leonard felt lucky. 

When he got home, Jocelyn was curled up on her side with her long-beautiful-sweet-smelling blonde hair fanned across her pillow. He kissed her cheek and told her how much he loved her until she was half awake and half-smiling and half-kissing him back.

\--

“I think,” Jocelyn said with her fingers tangling into the short hair at the nape of his neck and her half-bare skin against his arm while they took up space on the ratty-second-hand couch in their teeny-tiny living room, “I want to take a class or something.”

“Maybe you should,” he agreed and turned another page on the PADD. His eyes were tired and his brain was too full to wrap it around anything else. There was a test day after tomorrow and two papers he still hadn’t written. (He wasn’t a God-damn English major.) Someone wanted to know his thoughts on modern philanthropy (he had no such opinion) and someone else wanted an in-depth look at the endocrine system of Andorians. 

Her fingers tickled, her breath sighed, her body was warm where it touched him and cool everywhere else. “Leonard,” was a distracting whisper, “are you even listening to me?”

“Of course I am, sweetheart,” he agreed, “you’re going to take a class.” 

Hell, she could have one of his.

\--

Leonard was tripping over pottery before he realized that the class Jocelyn decided to take was some kind of thing offered out of the local art gallery. It met on Wednesdays which was alright because that was the day he was late for class in the morning and late getting home in the evening. He didn’t see Jocelyn until Thursday mornings when she woke him up with a smack on his shoulder and a:

_Get out of this bed or you’re going to be late_.

He stood in the shower blinking blurrily at the fancy rose-scented soap thinking that he should make time to go by some that didn’t leave him smelling like his girlfriend. Then he figured it didn’t matter because he loved his girlfriend and there were worse things to smell like.

\--

The second time they said (hey, man, we’re going to get something to drink), Leonard told them he didn’t have the money to go because he didn’t. There was no damn money for anything but food and he had to find a way to reapply for the scholarship while he worked in all the homework and maybe search around for a job that he could do at night.

Jocelyn was on the couch at home, legs folded under her, talking sweet and pretty to a bunch of women that Leonard couldn’t remember meeting or being told about. All he wanted was to fall into her arms and complain about things neither of them could change and all he got was wide-eyed-owl-blinks from a crowd of women. 

“This is Leonard,” Jocelyn said.

_Hi_ , he might have said. He knew better than to stay where they could try to pester him so he grabbed his books and a beer and went to take up space in his bedroom. He fell asleep snuggling an empty brown bottle and a textbook.

\--

Her nose twitched at the edges like a bunny rabbit and he was trying to listen but she just kept doing it down there at the end of the couch. Every little twitch changed the lilt of her voice while she read the stupid passage to him so he could (hear it and see it and remember it) rub her feet. She had gorgeous little pink toes.

_Why are you doing that?_ he asked when he couldn’t contain the stupid laugh that was bubbling in his throat.

“What?” she asked. But he was already halfway across the couch, crawling on his hands and knees either side of her body to pluck that PADD out of his way and kiss her cheeks and nose and lips. Maybe he said _twitching your nose like a bunny-rabbit_ and maybe he forgot to answer her question. He made damn sure to remember to take all her clothes off.

She was smelling his hair saying: _are you using my shampoo_ when he decided that was really going to love her forever. Even if she was going to laugh at him like that—maybe especially if she was.

\--

The thing was, Leonard didn’t think it was too damn much to ask that there be something worth eating in the evenings. He had maybe an hour and a half to get from his last class to his job and no time at all to stand around trying to figure out what fucking knob did what on the ancient oven. Maybe it was all because he’d been raised up with the notion that food was always ready on time or maybe it was fucking _unrealistic_ of him—but damn it all, it _wasn’t too much to ask_.

“I was busy,” Jocelyn said after the second week of no dinner.

“Doing what?” Leonard demanded half out of his school clothes and half into his uniform. The job wasn’t that classy or that great—he spent most of the night staring at his books wishing he could fall asleep and the other half mopping blood stains off the floor of the ER. It was one of those jobs that was supposed to give him experience and all he really learned was that mopping made his back hurt and there was no way to wash the smell of blood out of his nose.

“Things,” Jocelyn said back, one hand on her hip, “things you would know about if you were _around_.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Jocelyn? I’ve got to go to school! I’ve got to work or we won’t have any food—God _damn it_ ,” he shouted and threw the shirt he couldn’t get his arms into. It landed with no violence against a chair back. “You,” he said to her, “make me crazy.”

“You piss me off,” she snapped back.

“I _piss you_ off?” he repeated.

“Yeah!” she shouted and then it was nothing but the taste of her mouth and the smell of her soap as their skin rubbed together. She was angry and lonely and so full of need he couldn’t possibly fill. Her legs around his waist and he laid her across their bed and did all that he could because she needed it.

He needed it too—but he still went to work with no food in his belly.

\--

There was no third time; least he didn’t remember them asking him (get a drink?) a third time. He just remembered watching them go, the crowd of carefree boys without girls waiting at home and no midnight jobs mopping up blood. They were off (to get a drink) and he was off to find something in a silver package to stuff in his mouth before he went to some job he didn’t care much about.

It paid the bills.

\--

There was no summer vacation for doctors-to-be because there was too _too_ much to learn. Jocelyn didn’t ask and didn’t say but somewhere between those two things with her hands around his neck and her body wrapped (tight, wet) around him she might have whimper-panted something about how she was leaving for a month or so. 

Her kisses were like a drug—part of him remember long ago days of smoking and climbing trees. He must have whimpered something back to her (like talking to _caterpillars_ man, because they always _understood_ ) about how she should go.

He knew. Years later, when it wasn’t going to be worth shit to admit, he’d finally say it out-loud.

He always knew she wasn’t happy.

\--

The fourth time they shouted—(McCoy, drinks, no excuses)—he said, why the fuck not because there was nobody waiting for him at home. They went some place that was loud-loud-bright-blue-and _hot_. He swallowed shot after shot while the round table of sophomore boys went a little red under the collar and pink in the cheeks.

They choked and sputtered and he slurped their low-class whiskey with a grin. 

“The secret, boys,” he might have told them, “was learning to drink from your Granny.” Now there was a woman that could knock back a shot.

If they laughed it was only because they didn’t know.

\--

Jocelyn came back at the end of the summer all golden-brown and smelling like Georgia. She brought him a peach and he stripped her naked and kept her in bed with him for _hours_.

\--

It was no particular day, for no particular reason other than the light slanting in through the window of some burger-place caught Jocelyn’s eyes and made them so pretty. He had his mouth half-full of French fries and a mind three-quarters bogged down by another pointless list of facts he wasn’t ever going to remember after tomorrow when he took a long drink of _cold_ tea.

He offered out: “I think you should marry me,” like he was saying they ought to get dessert.

Jocelyn had mustard-ketchup mixed up all _orange_ at the corner of her mouth and a cheeseburger perched between her thumbs and two fingers. Her eyes were all wide then all bright and her smile was all distorted because she was still chewing. “Yeah?”

“I love you like crazy,” he said.

He was only twenty and nobody would have blamed him for being a fool.

\--

There about, for a while, it was a beautiful thing. There was a ring on her finger that bought him hot dinner every night and her, his forever-and-ever-and-after-that-too devotion. He tried to tell her (like his father had) how much he loved her every day and she always smiled when he did.

He remembered, late into the mornings, early in the afternoon, if he forgot to tell her (I love you) that morning. If he had a little extra change to spare he’d buy her a flower or something and she would call him a _fool_ if she was all alone that night and smirk big at all the unlucky women that weren’t married _to him_ if she had her crowd.

\--

“Where the hell have you been?” 

That must have been after the tenth-thirteenth-twenty-sixth time someone asked him to go for drinks. He remembered how loose his arms felt, how crooked his clothes must have been. He was fucking _drenched_ in it up to his eyeballs and rolling a smile around his mouth until he could sink his teeth into it and keep it still. 

Oh she was white-hot- _furious_.

That must have been the first night he snuggled up with couch cushions instead of his wife.

\--

The next summer came and she went. There was a week of her nagging at him as she folded her tank-tops and short-shorts into a little bag. She wanted him to go, she said he could manage it, she said that the other students _did it all the time_.

He told her that he wasn’t as smart as _the other students_ and he couldn’t make up what he’d missed by reading a book. He needed to see it and hear it and touch it and smell it if he was going to learn it. 

So she put a hand on her hip and rolled her eyes and told him that she’d be sure to tell his Granny that he missed her _real bad_ and maybe she’d tell Devon _congratulations_ on getting married too. 

Leonard hated her when she was like that.

\--

Shots turned into talking and talking turned into ideas and long before Leonard even knew how it happened he found himself burying the head of a statue with three drunken boys giggling like schoolgirls over their own damn genius.

He showed them how to do the job so you couldn’t tell the earth had been disturbed and they bought him another round at the only open-all-night bar in the area that would serve four already drunk idiots with dirt up to their necks.

\--

It turned out that he woke up face first into an unfamiliar toilet blinking hard and trying to remember where he was and where he’d been. There was a guy he half knew kicking him out of the way and he was rolling onto his side facing a wall ignoring the sound of someone taking a piss while his stomach rolled and his brain throbbed.

Sooner or later the man that pissed far too much was done—flushing—gone and another came stumbling in with his fingers tangled in his hair and his face split between agony and half-drunk giggles. “Shouldn’t you be gone? Don’t you got to go get your wife?” 

Leonard thought (yeah, maybe?) and then he was grabbing the toilet and puking until his insides felt like outsides. 

\--

Oh, Daddy loved Mommy without reserve or _reason_ and forever past death and whatever came later. Daddy loved Mommy early in the morning with sunlight in her eyes and last night’s snores on her breath. He loved her in the afternoon with flour on her hands and a wooden spoon across _his_ knuckles because she’d already told him (twice) that the pie was for later. Daddy loved her on holidays and weekdays and every day plus all the minutes in between.

When Leonard thought about it (when he had time, when he had the space in his head to _think_ anything) while he watched Jocelyn doing nothing special at all, he couldn’t make sense of it. Leonard loved Jocelyn every minute of every day and it exhausted him until he wanted nothing more than to walk up behind her (like this) and put his arms around her (like this) and he could kiss her cheek and her jaw and behind her ear where her pretty honey-blond hair curled against his nose.

Her shoulders loosened and her hands went lax and her breath was soft over her smile as she leaned her head back. For a minute (just a minute) he thought (this, oh hell yes _this_ forever) and forget everything else.

Then she would go stiff and touching her was like hugging nails and screws and he should have let go but he always held on until she pushed him away.

\--

“Leonard,” Jocelyn said with her fingers tangled into the short hairs on the nape of his neck and her sweater rubbing against the back of his arm. He was half asleep and wishing he was _all_ asleep but there were _things to learn_ still and no time at all to learn them in. “I think I should get a job. What do you think?”

“Mm,” he agreed, “sounds good, darling.” His head bobbed forward and he drew in a breath like the sheer force of it could keep him awake. Her fingers were like music stroking his neck and he’d always loved her lullabies.

\--

For a while their life broke down like this:

Dinner came from bags or silver wrappers, spread across a table that was never dirty but always stacked with books. 

He said: _I’ve got to observe a surgery tomorrow, I won’t be home until late_.

She said: _My boss is having a party at his place, I was thinking we should go_.

He said: _I’ve got to study, there’s a test_.

She said: _And there’s this thing (_ always a thing _) next month at the new development. I was thinking about going. We’re going to build houses._

He’d think: like anyone needed to build houses when there was a god-damn machine for everything nowadays. That was just because he felt like that sometimes. So he’d say: _Why’d they teach me all of this shit if there’s a tricorder that does it all. I don’t even need a brain_.

She’d sigh and say: _well you’ve got one._.

\--

Their second anniversary he bought her a necklace—it took months to scrounge together spare change. No drinking, no pranks, nothing but work-study-work. He hid it in the closet on the top shelf because she was too short to find it and she never bothered his stuff anyway.

So, when she woke up looking pretty and sweet, he had the little box all ready—on his belly, half across their bed and watching her sleep over the edge of rumpled blankets. She blinked at him and smiled with her hair in tangles. He held the little open box for her and she peered at it.

She said _what’s this for_? like she didn’t know. (Because she didn’t.) 

She said: _it was just so early_ and _I wasn’t awake yet_ and Leonard decided believing her was easier to dealing with the alternative.

\--

Sooner or later, he graduated. Then it was internship and real patients and what little time he thought he had as a student became negative time he knew he didn’t have as a new doctor. He found himself twenty-something (twenty six? Maybe twenty five? Maybe he really didn’t fucking know anymore) with a brain full of things that seemed just about pointless.

Jocelyn pulled his arm and pointed them back toward Georgia but he already had a place right here in old Mississippi so he said (maybe we should stay just until I finish this). 

He thought (her boss must love her) because she took every summer off and went right on back to Mommy-Daddy’s house and played like a teenager all damn summer. It wasn’t like Leonard was angry at her because he wasn’t (oh-yes-he-was) it was that she just hadn’t ever grown up.

\--

Years later, he wouldn’t even remember the first time he forgot that he’d forgotten to tell Jocelyn that he loved her. He would remember in perfectly clarity, the kind that was vivid clear and that meant it was half-fiction and all emotion that time she smiled at him across a picnic table surrounded by her work-friends. 

“Leonard tells me he loves me every day,” she said to her friends like she’d never been more _proud_ of being married to him, “and he doesn’t even always remember to put underwear on.”

Everyone laughed and Leonard protested with a “that was once!” and they laughed again. He thought—well, if he had to be the butt of her joke to see her sparkling smile that was alright too. (Except, when he looked on the horizon no damn sun was rising with the curl of her lips.)

\--

“Leonard,” she said with her fingers tickling the nape of his neck. She was crawling across him—naked in the morning—and he was groaning because there was so little time to sleep and less time to sleep _well_. “I think we should have a baby.”

“Right now?” he mumbled back at her.

Oh but eight-nine years later and she still knew exactly how to work him over. Her hand was warm and close and her body was right there behind it. The weight of the implication left him with a head spinning around trying to figure out the last time they’d gotten this close to fucking. Must have been a few weeks—oh hell, he couldn’t remember— “Yeah,” she breathed against his lips.

“What for?” he asked her. “Can’t we get a dog?”

“You are not serious,” Jocelyn said like teeth against his lip. Her hand was all stiff and every dreamy little sex thought he’d had a second ago was replaced with the cold slap of certainty that he wasn’t getting any _any time_ soon. “Did you just say that?”

“I’m not even awake, why are you asking me about babies now?” he pushed her back because she wanted to go anyway. 

So she went—off the bed and out of the room and banging around making breakfast until his ears were ringing with the curses she couldn’t bring herself to yell at him.

\--

All of Jocelyn’s dreams ended in Georgia. It was in all the things she didn’t say and all those things she did. It was in the hours she spent talking to Devon about the new baby and the old house and how the peaches were doing and if the air was still warm and—

Leonard packed her up that summer and kissed her cheek and hoped (only a little and only for a second) that maybe she just wouldn’t come back. That girl he’d met on a baseball field would have stuck her feet in the ground and said: 

_Boy, if you don’t get your ass back here, I ain’t never going to let you have me again_.

It was just that she wasn’t that girl (and he didn’t know when that happened or whose fault it was but he thought it _might-have-been_ his).

\--

So in the end, all at once, and out of nowhere at-all-precisely, (no, it wasn’t _that_ , it was that he just _never saw_ it coming), it was over. Not just one thing, but everything at once was just _over_ and it felt like somewhere, something—someone—was having themselves a hearty laugh at him the way you laugh at someone that went off and fell backward down a staircase.

Fuck it all—he just wasn’t looking behind him when he was trying to go forward.

\--

She (because he couldn’t say her name, he couldn’t even _think_ it because that name belonged to a woman he loved) said: “Leonard, I’ve been sleeping with Tim,” one day after dinner. Her hair was straight without waves, she was half-in and half-out her real-estate-assistant clothes. 

He remembered, she pushed her hands against her pinstriped skirt and pushed it flat against her thighs and she _didn’t look at him_ until she did and he _couldn’t even breathe_ much less look at _her_.

\--

What she never said was (I’m sorry) but they took up the same space for a few hours like one or the other of them was just building up to it. Mostly, he spent time in the bedroom sitting on the left corner of the bed staring at his hands asking himself:

_How_?

But not:

_Why_?

When she came to the doorway to ask him if he had anything to say he couldn’t look at her—so he didn’t—he just got up, palms itchy and hurting as he scraped them against his pants and he caught the edge of the door blind—because he wasn’t ( _was not_ ) looking at her—and pushed it shut.

\--

The screaming came later. She told him it was his fault, she told him that he was never there, she pointed her finger until she was red in the face with tears down her cheeks and watery snot on her lips and she _demanded_ to know when the last time he’d even wanted to touch her was.

He should have said that he wanted her every day and he shouted back at her that _if she wanted-it-that-badly_ the least she could have done was make a few extra credits getting it.

So she smacked him and she clawed at him and he took it because he deserved it and because it felt like anything but hollow. She was in his face—twisted and garish and _monstrous_ as she screamed until her body shook:

“ _I hate you!_ ” again and again so he wouldn’t ever forget it.

\--

When he brought the second foot up to plant right against his Granny’s old-fashion-hand-built wood porch, he had a bag on his shoulder and one hanging off his hand. He was a real-life doctor and a twenty-seven-year-old failure.

Devon pushed open the screen door with a fat-baby on her hip and she took in a breath as she pressed her lips together. “I made you some fresh biscuits,” she said.

\--

Leonard climbed trees some. He got drunk a lot. 

Oh, he got drunk all the damn time—out on the lake in a rowboat with a glass bottle hugged against his ribs, cradled close in the crook of his arm. He talked to the moon because it didn’t much care what he had to say. He thought about what _forever_ must mean and what _a promise_ was worth to (some people) anyone anymore. 

He had hard thoughts about tipping that boat over and floating along until he was floating nowhere at all.

Then again, he knew what he’d look like when they got his dead-bloated-body out of the water. He remembered what Devon looked like all bones-over-skin and _screaming_ when their Daddy died. He thought (well that’s just selfish) so he thought about drowning the wedding ring but he always just ended up drowning himself in whiskey instead.

\--

His Granny gave him a look across a spill of flour on the counter when he managed to get over the steps and the threshold and all the way against the counter while he was so drunk he was about three-quarters blind. He must have smelled like the floor of a bar but she didn’t do nothing but lift one of her little old eyebrows at him. 

There was biscuit dough in the bowl on the counter. 

“Boy, you’re just like your Daddy—you get it so _bad_.” She said it like she was sorry and proud and just _awed_ by it.

“Bunch of fucking fools, aren’t we?” he said with that loose-rolling-grin of his. He had a bottle in his hand still but he wasn’t sure what was in it. He tipped it up and spilled it down his throat. She hummed for him until he was flat on his ass with his back against the cabinet with his head back and his mouth open-dry-drunk.

\--

_She_ showed up on his front porch like she had any _fucking right_ to show up anywhere at all. It was two months after she just couldn’t keep her thighs (or her mouth) shut and she looked at him like she’d cried the whole way here and might just cry the whole way back.

“Leonard,” she said while he looked out at the trees trying to find somewhere that didn’t remind him of her, “I’m sorry. It was over long before—” She sounded defeated and beaten. “You don’t get to blame me for this.”

Fuck if he didn’t. “I didn’t fuck someone else,” he said to the screen and not to _her_.

Her sigh was guilt and regret and anger. She slapped the _divorce papers_ on a table with a fiery fury he always loved best about her. “I was fucking him for months before I told you. Did you notice? No. Maybe I wanted you to but you _didn’t_. Fuck you,” she snapped at him. Then she was gone (again) and all that was left of her was a blinking light on a PADD asking for his signature.

The marriage was over—her terms were set—all he had to do was agree.

\--

So he took a week.

He started with a bottle of Mr. Daniels best brew and he ended with a clear-glass-jar of something made from pure moonshine all silver and deadly. He drank it like poison until he didn’t remember anything. He didn’t remember moving—riding—walking—but he woke up in a hotel room in South Carolina wearing someone else’s shirt, no shoes and carrying a reminder that told him to report to bumfuck-nowhere Iowa to catch his ride to the Academy.

It took a few minutes to unglue his dirty eyes and wrap his drunken brain around the idea.

About the time he thought he remembered acting sober long enough to sign himself up for intergalactic slavery he discovered the tattoo on his left hip that was still raw-red and stinging. He had a God-damn butterfly fluttering above his ass and that was just about _perfect_.

\--

Leonard caught a ride back to Georgia, stripped himself naked of the week he lost, signed the damn divorce papers—considered getting the tattoo removed and decided to leave it—packed up what he would need and kissed his family good-bye.

-&-

**  
_side b: search and destroy_   
**  
The last thing Kirk realized—almost too late for it to matter, with blood in his nose and the taste of violence and beer on his skin—was that he was lost.

\--

When he was young, real young but not young- _young_ , Grandma Laura would say: _the boy needs direction_ and Grandpa Tiberius would sit out on the porch with his huge-ancient hands across his wife’s dainty long fingers. Grandpa Tiberius would sigh and he’d look at the stars like he was so sorry about something that he couldn’t never apologize enough for—he’d say: _I just don’t know, Laura, I just don’t_ know. _I’ve done everything I know how_.

To Kirk (who was still Jim back then) it sounded like his Grandpa was beat up and abused and giving up. It left his belly wriggling in funny ways as he crawled back upstairs and into Sam’s bed. Sam would hug him like a teddy bear and Kirk could sleep there (just for tonight).

\--

Kirk took up running when he was eighteen-fresh-out-of-school with no other direction to go in. The counselors at school cried _wasted potential_ into their hot-hot-coffee until they were red in the eyes and belly-sick. They must have tried calling his mother all the way in space after they gave up trying to communicate to Grandpa Tiberius (who did everything he can) because Winona sent him a message telling him (don’t give up).

The thing was, as Kirk ran this way or that down the highway until his back was soaked in sweat and his hair was swing-swing-beating against his temples, there was an unpronounced _yet_ on the end of (don’t give up) that seemed to suggest that his life was going to get better. He didn’t think too much while he ran because it was all about the shift-shiver-sway of his body in motion but if he did think he might have thought there wasn’t much of a way to get worse. 

Then and again, he thought about running until he couldn’t stand to move anymore and _never coming back_ and the idea was so sweet on his lips that he wanted to drink it down until it filled him up and he overflowed. He kept it like a secret in his chest that weighed him into place. When he started fights he thought (hit me, fuck you, hit me as hard as you can) and ( _I could_ fly) and ( _I hate you_ ) and he beat his body against theirs until they were straight through the skin to blood and there were no secrets.

He screamed in his head until he felt like his body was rattling left and right when it was perfectly still. But out in that cold air, under the blinking white stars, he only thought ( _I could leave, I could leave, I could just_ leave.)

\--

There was a man in the back of the bar that stared at Kirk’s shoulders like he could rip his clothes off with just his thoughts (maybe he could). They did a little dance the whole evening, Kirk throwing himself with shameless ferocity at pretty women who rolled their eyes at his antics because this-was-Thursday-dear and not Saturday. He smiled and they wavered but they always _left_ and that was plenty fine with him.

The man would buy him drinks and wink his left eye and sip his own glass with a smirk every time Kirk struck out. 

When the night was morning and the girls were just about all gone or all taken, that man was against Kirk’s back with his arm across his chest—groping his shirt to find tits that Kirk just didn’t have and his tongue was alcohol-wet in his ear. He didn’t say much with words but he said everything with a rock of his hips and his hard dick against Kirk’s ass. 

I-want-you in every touch and every breath. So Kirk tipped his head back instead of forward, arm up, hand cupping the back of the man’s neck and he whispered—like a soft grunt-laced-with-moan: “No.”

The nameless man with the hard-on said: _sure?_ like maybe Kirk just didn’t understand what no meant and he clearly never would have turned this dick down—not if he knew what sort of ride he could be getting. Hot palm going down his belly, fingers spread as his ass was pulled back and his shoulders pushed forward. There he was half-bent-over a table and his head was spin-spin-spinning with infinite possibility.

He could fucking _fly_ because he’d done it before. All the seconds of the world in the thump-thud-hard pound of a little boy’s heart as the car went one way and his body went the other. Fear choking down his throat and the ridiculous, reckless feeling of being _alive_ because if this went sour he was going to be _dead_.

Kirk’s hands were across a dirty table and there was a bartender and two bored patrons looking at him with curious raised eyebrows thinking _fucking kids these days_ or maybe _he’ll take it—take it up the ass because that’s what he_ does. 

Everything went a little white around the edges, blood-warm and it smelled like sweat-skin-beer before it was just _lost_ and he thought he might have kicked the table and shoved the man. He thought he could see that _crazed-fucking-look_ on Winona’s face when she thought (I’ll kill you, Frank, I’ll fucking kill you) because Kirk wanted to break (someone) something and it _never_ worked.

“Fuck you,” he said to the man with his fists curled and his body so tight with tension his teeth were turning to powder right there in his mouth.

What he meant was: _I’m not that. I’m not. I’ll never be that_.

Whatever _that_ was.

\--

The other thing was that he’d never been in love.

\--

There he was at twenty, buck naked in his shower with nothing on his mind and nowhere to go. The water was running tepid because he’d pushed his forehead against the tile and left it there something like thirty-minutes-ago. 

Every breath was a wet breath and every exhale tingled on his lips were the fat drops were wiggling like falling leaves. His fingers were curled, palms pushed to the wall and he wanted—(anything, oh fuck, _anything_ )—to _break something_ so bad his shoulders were knotted and his knuckles hurt.

But there was a pink stain to the water from yesterday’s fight, a soon-to-be scar going across his hipbone where some lucky bastard that had too much to drink and not nearly enough of a conscience got a hold of a broken bottle.

\--

Libraries were leftover from yesteryear when books were made of paper and not of metal-over-circuits with a faded-old-scratched screen. But paper depleted the environment and everyone had gotten real smart about conservation after they damn near died. 

Sometimes (occasionally) he wished that man hadn’t ever gotten smart enough to start caring because sometimes when he was holding a chunk of metal he daydreamed about books made of paper. (Books like Grandpa Tiberius kept in his bedroom that little boys weren’t allowed to touch because they were _very old_ and _yes older than me, Jim_.) 

The librarian was one of those women that had decided when she was twelve or thirteen that _trying_ was giving into some invisible double standard of behavior and she didn’t care what her damn eyebrows looked like. Make up was nothing but conforming and she would be damned if she wanted to be a sex symbol. Physically speaking—she was nothing that Kirk wanted to get his hands on because she wore brown when she would have looked better in blue and she had frizzy hair that she let hang sometimes limp and sometimes wiry around her ears.

Then again, behind all that, she was a brilliant woman. He leaned across the desk and smiled at her because she could rattle off titles like she _really knew them_ and he wanted to lick the words right out of her mouth every time she started talking about the nineteen fifties. (Because she got it, because she understood that man was smarter and dumber and lost-found-confused all at once.)

“You’ve read every book in the library,” she told him one Saturday looking-up-at-him instead of down. “Except the romance section.”

He leaned on his elbows (because that’s what he _did_ ) across the counter in front of her desk and smiled. “Do you read romance?”

Her blush was pink-hot-embarrassed and she glanced down at her hands and her screen before she looked back up at him. She was nothing he wanted but she’d point her little finger across the way and say: “the section right over there,” like she thought he cared.

Kirk drummed his fingers and fists against the counter as he nodded—grinned—and went right over to find something to read for a while.

\--

His mother’s visit (he called it an _inspection_ ) came on a Friday when he was scratching his new scar and balancing a bowl of steaming instant oatmeal in one hand as he shuffled from the kitchen to his mattress. Like it always went she set her hard-cased bag down on the floor and shook the strap off her arm.

“How’s Sam?” he asked around a hot-hot-burning mouthful.

“Last time I heard from your brother he was fine,” Winona told him. She didn’t look old and that was always strange to him. If he was almost twenty she had to be almost fifty and she shouldn’t have looked like she did. Space and time should have shriveled her into the ugly dried thing that she had to be under her skin. “Glass?” she asked with a nod toward the pink scar his blunt nails were pulling at.

“Beer bottle,” he agreed.

Winona nodded.

He pointed his spoon at the couch under the books stacked on it. “It’s comfortable.” Then he went on his way because there was breakfast to eat and nothing at all to do after that.

\--

When they were little— _little_ , little—Sam would have nightmares. The way Kirk had (over)heard it, their father had looked his boy in the face and promised (we’ll be back soon, champ) and poor-little-Sam’s poor-little-broken-heart must have remembered that. Sam had nightmares (about their mother dying) about death that left him shaking and sobbing.

\--

It was still night-but-morning-like-3AM when he crawled out of his bed on his tiptoes and found himself standing in the doorway between his room and the living room. There was the litter of broken things he kept on the floor (he liked _possibilities_ ) and a cast of light from the kitchen that brushed across his mother on the couch. He thought, for a moment, that she must have been sleeping but her elbow moved and he saw her blue-blue-damn blue eyes catching the yellow gleam of the light.

Her stare was twice what his could have been and all his questions seemed silly and confused in the face of hers. “Couldn’t sleep?” was what she asked him.

“Usually don’t,” was a child’s attempt at vindictiveness that left him feeling strange stupid and hollow. What he wanted to do was shout at her for being on his couch when she wasn’t staying because she’d never stayed and call her all the names that banged around the inside of his skull like (bitch) and (whore) and scream until he couldn’t breathe and he’d say (was he a good fuck, was he? Was Frank so good you couldn’t stand it?) or maybe just—maybe—(you left me). 

If not that, he might have asked: (did you know).

\--

Kirk never-ever-not _once_ brought them home. Fucks were those things that happened against walls or in hotel beds with big pillows and _magic fingers_ that had the bed vibrating. His brain rattling in time with her breath and it was all over in a little burst of light-sound-sensation and a curious rush of fluid that left him breathless. 

Then it was over and it didn’t matter.

When he (got fucked) fucked men in was hurry-push-shove-bite in the back of a car or bent across something with a fist in his shirt and the grunt-hiss-beat of breath and skin and bone against him and _inside him_. He ached and burned and clawed and bit his lips until they were blood-red and tasted just like the nothing of his whole fucking life.

_Wasted potential_ was slip-stumble-falling into his very own apartment he didn’t fucking pay for, with a bottle in his fist that he _didn’t fucking pay for_ (least not with money) and wet-bites on his neck. The phantom feel of being crushed under another body and fucked until he was _blind_ and finding his mother on her knees, in her pajamas, with her delicate fingers piecing together broken things.

He stopped—sloppy-fucking-sideways grin etched across his giggling face. The bottle tipped, the liquid poured like a God-damned _river_ through his teeth and over his tongue and down his throat-neck-chest-belly. Winona looked up at him with her soft-brown eyebrows lost under a fringe of fake-blonde hair. He _giggled_ as he kicked her precious little whatever-the-fuck and stomped on it until his pants were slipping off one bruised hip. He ground the heel of his boot against broken pieces until they were just _fucking ruined_ while she sat back and watched.

Everything tipped right and then left—sloshy-sloshy-slosh—as he pointed his finger around the tall neck of the bottle at her. He said: “oops.”

But he wanted her to cry and she only stared.

\--

It happened like this—(no it didn’t, maybe backward-sideways-upside-down-ways):

His hand stinging because he’d never hit _anyone_ like that—no, never, not him, (you _just shut your mouth Jim_ mee) until suddenly he did. The whole of his palm and fuck his fingers, straight across her face and the sound of it was echoing against the walls so loud he couldn’t stop the ragged suck of his own breath.

(No, not that.)

The bottle of booze hit the floor with a thump but not a crash and a gulp but not a slop. His feet were twisting over broken things while she was standing up and her eyes were just blank and _angry_ but what the fuck ever happened that she _earned_ the right to talk to him like that.

(Wait, first wasn’t it—)

_So you can break things…_ she said like she could just fucking _dismiss him_ like he didn’t _fucking matter_.

(And then.)

Winona wasn’t his mother because she hadn’t ever held him when he fell, she hadn’t wiped his nose when it ran, and she hadn’t read him long stories late at night when he couldn’t sleep. She didn’t hear him when he didn’t cry and know when he wanted cookies and hot chocolate because he felt _awful_. She wasn’t his mother because she had walked out on him—because his father had died—because she wasn’t anyone’s mother and she never-ever-once had been. He hated her for all the things she wasn’t and couldn’t ever be.

\--

_I won’t cry for you_ was defiance that burned on his tongue and she didn’t seem to give a damn with her face brilliant red and raised edges all on one side, her socks in spilt booze and her hands on her hips. She was saying _do it again_ and he was the one with tears in his eyes until the world blurred all around him.

He sucked liquid snot back through his nose, back of his hand across his upper-lip-under-his-nose like a three year old and her head tipped just a little but he _hated her_ so much more than he did half a second ago. 

“You took the car,” Winona said like she had any idea like she _knew_ , “I would have burned his fucking house down.”

He hit her again—slapped her like he got slapped for mouthing off and she took it like he had, head to one side, eyes down and all he saw—all he saw—was _nothing_ and he hated her _so much_ he thought he must have been crying.

\--

Kirk woke up with a pillow and a blanket on the hard-cool floor of his living room next to a half-dried puddle and a blurry landscape of bits and pieces. Cotton in his skull and down the back of his throat kept him from thinking much but when it started coming back all he could remember was—

Salt tracks down his face but his mother never touched him. She had been there, socks beyond the edge of his vision when he had been on his knees trying not to beat his fists against the floor then it didn’t matter because he was passing out and blackness was blessed relief. 

Winona wasn’t there now and that was a blessed relief too.

\--

They were both occupying the same place when he heard the news—it was always on, playing over instant broadcast from the receiver set into the wall. Sometimes he cared, sometimes he didn’t (sometimes he didn’t understand why he kept it on at all) but this time it said:

_House fire_.

Winona was picking blackened ash out from under her fingernails wearing strange clothes that smelled flammable. She looked at him with her lip bruised all around the edge where he’d smacked her. Like she’d waited all his life to bother, she stood up and said: “I can’t save you.” She didn’t say (I never tried) but he understood that part anyway. “I couldn’t even save myself, George saved me.”

_I gave up_ , she told him, _the day you were born_.

\--

The other (other) thing he found out was that he wasn’t afraid—it had its uses.

\--

Winona was gone and Kirk was back in his favorite bar, leaning on the counter, sipping a cold one waiting for something to happen to him. He met a woman with a cold smile that had hot skin and danced with him until he had her naked and panting against the side of the building, her nails in his arms and his tongue in her mouth.

Nothing had changed.

\--

Her name was Doris and that might just have been why she didn’t care about her eyebrows. It was a family name, she told him once, from the nineteen fifties. It was better than her sister’s name (that was Ethel). She leaned on her elbows as she looked up at him and asked him how he was finding those romance novels. She meant (did you like that ridiculous drivel) but she asked him like it was a real question and her wellbeing depended on the answer.

Kirk wanted to say (fucking unrealistic shit) but he left that knocking around his head and leaned across the counter to get close enough to smile-twinkling-eyed at her just how they always seemed to do it in stupid romance novels. He said: “I’ve read worse things.”

Her laugh was startling because he had thought she’d be offended—he wanted her to be—she leaned back in her seat a little and offered out: “There’s a larger library over in Riverside that Starfleet maintains. They probably have something you’d rather be reading.”

“It’s a long walk,” was his excuse but it was only an excuse. He found himself more stupid books to read to fill the long stretches of silence that came after sundown and before sunup when he couldn’t sleep.

\--

 

It was nothing that he exactly intended to do but the option was there and Kirk found himself sitting in on some aptitude test that would tell him what career path would be best for him. There was nothing better to fucking do with himself (and maybe _maybe_ he wasn’t ready to give up) Still, he skimmed through the test, answered their questions and turned it in and maybe he gave them his address because maybe he was curious about what they had to say.

So a few weeks later he got a message announcing that he was destined to be a starship captain. If not a captain than he’d make an excellent science officer and if that failed well, he could always settle for being an engineer (fuck that).

The point was—(if the test could be trusted) his life ended with Starfleet.

(Maybe he wasn’t ready to try yet either.)

\--

He found the motorcycle by the side of the road with its engine busted open like someone had beat the fuck out of it for having the audacity to stop working. Kirk stared at it (he kind of liked it) for a while and paced back and forth deliberating about whether or not it counted as stealing or _just something to do for a while_ and decided it was the latter not the former. He crouched in the grass picking up the little bits and pushing them into his pockets before he lifted the kick stand and pushed the damn thing miles back down the highway to where he was living.

It was a few weeks of rereading a few manuals and a matter of wasting some of his beer-drinking money for extra pieces but he had a ride at last.

\--

Kirk found himself reading about Banner fucking O’Brien falling in love with some angry doctor type back before there was any kind of real technological advancement while he chewed on his toothbrush in the bathroom. It was stupid and ridiculous and he just about laughed at himself over the whole thing except for the way he was clicking _next_ and _next_ just to see how great this little love story worked itself out to be.

In the end, they all had babies and everyone was happy and nobody’s fucking father died. Kirk threw the book and spit out his toothbrush and wondered if these people that wrote this shit lived in the real world.

\--

Doris wanted to see his bike so they stood in the parking lot outside the library with him patting the seat and her picking her fingernails. There wasn’t anything in a motorcycle that was going to impress the kind of woman that Doris was so he didn’t quite know why she was out there trying to smile anyway. 

“If you had a leather jacket you could be James Dean,” she said.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

Doris lectured him about the things _everyone should know_ until they found themselves standing outside in the evening air and she was pink from exertion and half-speechless because it had been _hours_ and they weren’t half done talking but the library needed to be locked. (Pointless to do, really, anyone with a calculator could crack the security code.) Her embarrassment was as palpable as the smell of her wet panties. 

He thought (I could have her) all he had to do was ask. 

\--

He suggested coffee and she’d said she had the best coffee maker in the world. Kirk looked everywhere in her bedroom but he only found her naked skin that tasted like pasted-on skin moisturizer and stale perfume at her neck. She was a beautiful woman in the dim light with her clothes off and her thighs spread around him like every red-haired-heroine so exalted in romance novels. 

Her cat sat on the dresser and watched him fuck her until her nails bit into his skin and she was half-grimacing-half-frowning saying “ _slow down, Jim_.” It wasn’t anything anyone ever asked him before but he tried it and she unfolded beneath him like a living work of art—arm over her head and body arching against him because he made her feel _good_.

\--

When it was over and she was in the bathroom cleaning herself up proper (still talking about coffee like maybe she didn’t realize that was just a _line_ ) he was crouching full-dressed in her office. There bookshelves against every wall and a small computer lost between stacks and stacks of real live paper books. Without meaning to at all he opened one just to run his fingers down the age-rough-thin-fragile pages.

Balanced on toes he brought the open book up to his face to drag the smell of it into his lungs. Eyes closed as he tasted the dust of age and it was _beautiful._ Without meaning to at all, he found himself reading the printed words—one after another until he was half through the book and she was there in her bathrobe with wet hair.

“You can stay,” she whispered.

\--

The first thing was he replaced solitude with _isolation_ and wasn’t smart enough to remember it all meant that he was _alone_.

\--

Sometimes, when Doris thought he was sleeping, she’d run her blunt-curious fingers across his scars and dream of fantastic dreams for him. Kirk thought she must have liked him laying bare there under her because he was nothing but a dream that lived-and-breathed (just asleep) and all her beautiful romantic dreams were true.

Someone found her beautiful, someone wanted her, someone had finally-finally-at- _last_ seen her for what she was. When she was sure that he was sleeping (but he wasn’t) she’d kiss the pale scar on his shoulder and sigh like this was _true love_.

\--

Kirk got on the motorcycle the day he turned (twenty one) and he pointed it nowhere just somewhere and he pushed it until it could go no farther. The engine was hot and overworked, panting like a laboring animal between his thighs so he dumped it nowhere in particular because _it didn’t matter_ and found the first place that served something to numb him into nothing.

Oh the music was loud-fuck-loud and he found himself climbing onto a table, kicking over glasses while the crowd clapped and his shirt was ripped right off his body by his own hands. The music throbbed through him while he swung the shirt over his head—every person in the crowd was salivating for him, for his dick and his body, all tongues over lips-and-tongue.

He didn’t even know what fucking state he was in but he knew how to take what he wanted and oh-hell-he-wanted. 

\--

There were three of them. Mindy, Wendy and Evan (but those weren’t their real names). Mindy and Wendy liked to kiss and Kirk liked to fuck so he pushed him flat and fucked one—one after the other—the way he never-ever-could fuck Ms. Doris with the curious fingers. They scratched and clawed and gasped.

After when they were sweat over exhausted skin, they sat with spread thighs and pink tongues and wandering fingers jerking one another off while Evan bent him over the bed and fucked him hard-fast-cruel. 

Kirk bit his own fingers until the marks were deep to the bone and he thought he’d never feel anything but the twisting confusion of pain and fury.

\--

Doris didn’t understand, when he came back a few weeks later. Doris was one of those (like Grandma Laura) who just wouldn’t ever understand. It was Doris-and-him for a matter of months (maybe four, maybe six, maybe he’d read half her library and wanted to spend all his life sitting with crossed legs reading her books about nothing) but he’d been Kirk-by-himself for the twenty-one years before that. No, she was like Grandma Laura (disappointed not _angry_ ) with tears in her eyes.

He had bruises on his hips, teeth marks on his knuckles (still— _still_ ) and fading half-healed scratches down his back. He said: “I didn’t know we were being monogamous.” Like monogamous was a bad word (because it was, oh hell it was, because monogamy was that thing that meant all your life was in someone else and if they died well—what the fuck were you living for?)

There was no understanding her through the tears (and sobs) but her pointed finger told him to get out.

(And _never come back_.)

\--

Kirk didn’t think while he was running. It was about the fluid shift of his body all at once—it was running away from the thoughts that kept him bound and gagged and held under. Running was about _letting it go_ so he ran from one end of the world to the other (or it felt like it) and when he got back to where he started everything was still waiting for him.

Broken things on his floor.

\--

For a long time—a long, long time—he did nothing.

\--

The first time he picked up the broken bit off the floor it was nothing more than a morbid curiosity. He thought—well he could _crush_ it the way Winona burned down some man’s house just _because she could_ and was up-away-and-gone again in a starship doing things he had only read about in vague details. There were hammers and heels and if he wanted to he could burn it because _everything burned_ if it got hot enough. 

(He could burn.)

He put it back on the floor, he left it there—broken, abused and _humiliated_ lying naked on the floor for anyone to see. 

It was safe through his door and into the room with the mattress and his clothes in piles that looked like clean-dirty-in between. There was his blanket and pillow and the peace of blackness that came with sleep. He laid in the dark feeling (broken, abused and _humiliated_ ) like he’d failed somehow when he hadn’t ever failed at anything. 

He hadn’t ever _tried_ anything. 

\--

Doris looked down-not-up at him when he stopped in front of her desk. Her nose twitched like she knew him by the smell and maybe that made sense when it had been (four maybe) six months of time spent in close quarters sharing (wasting) time. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” he told her.

There was no romance in her eyes when she looked at him, just someone that was old and used and too beaten to bother trying to assure him that it wasn’t his fault. It was a strange feeling to know that she was _disappointed_ and _hurt_ and that it was everything that _he’d_ done and nothing to do with (his father) anything else. “I’m sorry,” she assured him, “I thought—you’re just who you are, Jim. You’re just not who I thought.”

“What did you think I was?”

Her stare was unflinching—solid—“A good man.”

\--

She was beautiful. Kirk watched her half the night because she really was _beautiful_ and she was never going to as much as glance at him. Oh no, not some smiling hair-flipping beautiful woman with a real neat cadet uniform that was a long-fucking-way from Starfleet Academy but wore her pride like a shield and dismissed everyone around her as _unworthy_.

Kirk wanted to fuck her because she would never want him. 

When it ended in a brawl that ended in a lecture that ended with him face-to-fucking-face with Christopher Pike Captain, thank you-very-fucking-much, he was still chugging beer to ease the burn of the thoughts he couldn’t quite shut off.

Broken things and lost things and the feeling under his skin that he wanted to leave or burn the world but (fuck anything) but what he was doing. So Captain Pike, with a tone like Grandpa Tiberius, looked him in the face and asked him flat out if he was going to be (nothing, _like his mother_ or) half the man his father was.

I-dare-you-to-do-better was a stupid line and Kirk couldn’t get it out of his head because nobody had ever (not once) expected him to do anything and certainly never asked him to be (half as good as) his father.

\--

The important thing, he found out one drunken night, was that he was going to die alone and when he told the stars they winked back at him with a real cruel-cosmic smirk and asked what else he thought he deserved.

\--

The drunk doctor called him _kid_ and he talked about nothing and a lot of it. The whiskey must have done it to him because he smelled like he’d been swimming in it for a while. When he talked about anything he talked in spurts and bursts about some woman without a name that must have been his ex-wife.

When the trip was over and Kirk was (good-bye Iowa and hello San Francisco) stepping off the shuttle, the doctor blinked at the sun like it offended him, sniffed the air like it made him want to puke and then looked over at him.

It was all that polite-southern-upbringing when McCoy stuck his hand out. “It was nice to meet you,” he said.

“Sure,” Kirk agreed.

“Glad I didn’t puke on you,” McCoy added before he was licking the last taste of whiskey out of the flask.

Kirk snorted and nodded his head. “Me too.”

\--


	3. i took a fall/cold fission

03.  
 _ **side a: i took a fall**_  
When anyone bothered to ask (and _nobody_ ever did) how he met his ex-wife (that _bitch_ wasn’t ever going to have a name again) he told them it happened on a baseball field. Long after all he felt about her was bitterness in his gut and bile in his throat, he would remember the sun in her hair and her little-girl’s-voice telling him:

_Run, McCoy, while you’ve got the chance_.

She always gave the best advice, that girl on the baseball field.

Years from now, whenever someone asked him how he met that kid with the ridiculous name (James _T_ even if he didn’t look half grown enough to handle a name like James and would never take himself seriously enough to shoulder _Tiberius_ ) he’d tell them they never _exactly_ met certain one way or the other.

If they did, Leonard just didn’t remember how exactly. Maybe it involved whiskey, maybe it involved violence because that was about all that him or Jim were any good at when they met. Throwing back shots and throwing punches.

\--

Loneliness, Leonard found, wasn’t such a strange sensation. The realization left him feeling chilly all over his skin as he sat on his _dorm bed_ at twenty eight and wondered how the hell he’d ended up spending the past _ten_ years of his life studying. Then again, he figured, as he stared at empty space around him and a stack of PADDs that were all _standard issue_ , at least studying was something he was good at.

\--

No liquor was allowed in the dorms or on school grounds and that was _just fine_ because Leonard had two good legs and one good nose. He could sniff out something worth swallowing for miles away and it was no burden at all to work his way to The Bar on the Corner and have a few. The beer there was always watered down but the hard drinks were always _hard_ and it left him feeling bubbling hot and everything was easier to swallow.

Alone wasn’t alone if you closed your eyes and only saw the other students crowded around your shoulders. Everything was cast in hues of red—every little sight was comparing how the tight seams fit that body or that one. He could list the symptoms of space diseases and the internal organs of aliens he’d never even _seen_ until he felt dizzy and the whole fucking world _rattled_ with the repetitive motion of his jaw tripping over long syllables.

At the end of the day, far from the splash-spill-spew of bright lights and neon whiskey, he was crawling into a thin bed all alone, pulling the blankets over his head like a child that thought he could block out the light and the nightmares and sooner-or-later Mommy was going to come save him.

\--

It wasn’t that Leonard needed to be taught to be a doctor because he _was_ a fucking doctor. It was that Starfleet’s Academy needed free slave labor so he must have sold them his soul and his medical license just for the chance to get the fuck away from _her_ and Georgia and if that weren’t enough _the whole fucking Earth_.

(Devon, in the kitchen with a fat baby on her hip, said _but you hate flying, Lenny._ )

He spent long days in the futuristic clinic playing at doing something with his life to earn his keep and all the frustration that came with _becoming an officer_. He knew a lot about healing burns and broken bones and he knew enough about blue-green-yellow-red skin to know when it wasn’t healthy but fuck if he knew what Starfleet was; where they started or ended or why he should care. Maybe back in fifth grade between the history of the planet and right before he stopped paying attention they had gone into the history of the Federation.

There was something about Vulcans, Leonard could remember that. Vulcans had something to do with it.

\--

It was lunch time and the horde of first-year-plebes were crowding the halls just to get a chance at getting some of the hot food before the second years, before the third-fourth-fifth-last-years. Bones stood with them, elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder, getting pushed and shoved. Nobody was starving on Starfleet’s time but you couldn’t have told that from the stampede.

Leonard thought they were all a little stupid but he was a little hungry so he let them shove him around.

To the side, behind a table, there was some kid that looked half-familiar with his shorn-off blond hair and wide blue eyes. He was staring with a red-red-red apple pressed against his lips like he wasn’t sure he wanted to bite it just now or wait a minute. That kid was contemplating violence juxtaposed with the meaning of life and overlapped with the poetry of true beauty so pure and unadulterated it would have made a grown man weep. 

Mostly, Leonard thought, the kid was thinking about hitting something with his already (still) bruised knuckles.

\--

She was a student nurse by the name of _Christine_ and she was clumsy in all the wrong ways and annoying in about three more. It was her first _placement_ and she wanted him to take it easy on her. 

Leonard caught her in an empty room and told her that her stupid mistakes killed people and he’d be damned if he was going to work with an idiot that couldn’t read or follow directions. She had tears in her eyes and a shine to her cheeks as she stared him down and for all that he (wanted her to cry) waited for her to defend herself, she stood there and took every cruel word he spit at her.

_Ridiculous_ and _dangerous_ and said something about _infants knowing better than to_.

He was shaking with his own spit and vigor and she was tilting her chin up like he wasn’t ever going to be man enough to beat her down as she snapped to attention all _yes sir_.

\--

The streets were all paved in San Fran-fucking-cisco. The only grass grew in parks and on lawns and it was bright-brilliant-blithely green. He walked one end of it to the other over a weekend until his feet were sore and his elbows were wet with the damp drizzle of rain. His belly was heavy with something sloshy and his mind was numb so everything was alright and fuzzy.

He found a bench and parked his ass until the golden light turned gray and then charcoal and finally black all around him. Everything was a chill like a frost and he was elbows-on-knees just staring at pavement under his feet.

\--

Chirp-chirp- _cheep_ was time to wake up. Over and over again until Leonard buried the communicator under a pillow _under his bed_ because he learned to hate it the second week he was here and wanted to smash it three months later. Every little chirp was another chore and another fool-idiot-plebe gone off and done something ridiculous and _stupid_. 

Just this once, he thought, like a haphazard slide down a tunnel that he’s going to _fucking leave it be_ this time and if someone dies then it was their own fault for not following _regulations_ or living up to _standards_ like the rest of the blank-faced-red-uniforms that swarm day to fucking day around the campus. (No, he’d never think that.) Everything is heavy and he’s five-seconds-away from just telling the world to _fuck off_ and contemplating dropping out of this shit.

Away is far enough from _that bitch_ but far-away is too far when he thinks sometimes he wakes up with her name trembling behind his teeth and his head full of memories of times he thought were _good_ and were nothing but nightmares now. (Watch what you lost, baby boy, watch what you’re just _never going to have_ again.)

Fuck the communicator and whoever was dying on the other end of it. Leonard pushed his face into the pillow and his hands over his head and thinks (maybe for a minute) that he’s selfish enough to believe himself.

\--

_What_ he demanded into the fucking little thing that’s half-round and half-rectangular and not-at-all convenient while he’s on his gut on the floor, one arm still under the bed, face in dust and lint, barking into the little mouth piece when he knows it’s not _regulations_ and that just might be another lecture on communications he’s going to get.

“Hey, listen,” the voice on the other end said like it knew that it was about to be told to fuck off. “I’m behind a dumpster.” He said it like it was important and Leonard should care—

“Who the hell is this?” Leonard asked. The chronometer (because it’s not a clock anymore, it’s a fucking _chronometer_ ) up on the beside table looked like it might say something like 0300 and the darkness outside the window sounded like it might be raining.

“Jim Kirk,” the voice on the other side said. “You didn’t puke on me—”

—That could be _anyone_ and there’s nobody that would be calling him in San-Fran-fucking-cisco. Leonard just about closed the communicator but there’s:

_Look, I know you don’t care…_

So maybe they knew one another—maybe this kid across a communicator knew something nobody else had bothered figuring out yet.

\--

“Oh fuck yes,” was a dirty curse across dirty lips, and a plea to be saved panted hard-fast-low-and all at once nothing but _filth_ that left him drenched in it. The whole place felt like it was closing in and here was the boy with blue eyes staring up (and never down) while some woman of various colors gyrated in his lap just _begging for it_ like his dick was gold.

Leonard had an elbow against the table and a hand against his thigh under the table and he just _couldn’t remember_ how he’d gotten here. 

But there was that woman slip-slink-sliding right under the table and there was the kid with the eyes as fake-blue as the San Francisco sky pulling his regulation-zipper down as he spread his knees wide and let her have a taste of eternity springing straight from the fountain of youth.

_Someone_ Leonard thought (then) and it was off-beat with everything, _didn’t teach this kid a single fucking thing_ about decency.

\--

It’s nothing but those cop-types with the metal faces poking around the alley when Leonard got there through the hiss of steam across the roads. It’s a dank alley between the coffee shop with the soft light and dark windows and the all-night-porn-shop with a flickering old-fashion light that was supposed to look like neon and just looked tacky. There was a spill or music from a bar and a thick stench of puke and liquor in the air.

The first cop went left and the second went right and Leonard went straight for the dumpsters. He _doesn’t_ care so he doesn’t _understand_ why he’s here but there it is. He was grabbing the top of the third dumpster to pull himself up on top of it while he cursed at himself, finding slippery footing as he stumbled across it to the middle one. There in the dark behind, in space not half big enough for a child and nowhere near big enough for the full-grown-kid that was supposed to have been lying back there was someone with a communicator that knew all of Leonard’s secrets.

_Hey_ comes the close whisper like a smirk in the dark, _Want to get a drink?_

Then it’s a pale hand and a matter of pulling the filthy body out of the dark and they’re two men standing on a dumpster.

\--

“What was that?” Leonard asked—eventually.

_I didn’t hurt anyone_ , Jim (because that was his name, _Jim Kirk_ that was short for James Tiberius) said sideways. It sounded like he’d said it his whole life and nobody quite believed him so Leonard just shrugged and they ended up somewhere with mostly-naked women.

First it had been alright (like _tolerable_ ) and then a little sickening and then Jim T. Kirk was getting his dick sucked while he drank beer out of a brown bottle, hissing between his teeth now and again—holding a fucking conversation about non-native breweries like it’s _nothing at all_.

Leonard thought that if it weren’t so disgusting he might have hated Jim but there was something to the way he could come without caring and kiss the girl right on the swollen lips like paying for something he could have lived without. 

It’s the _attitude_ , Leonard decided later (but not then), James T. (fucking) Kirk could rule the world.

\--

Everything Leonard new about women he’d learned from his idiot-big-sister and she was _determined_ that he never forget exactly what she taught him. Sunday mornings when he’d rather have his head in a toilet or at least under a pillow she was up at the ass-crack of dawn calling him. He was twenty eight and she was getting older every year with strange-strings of gray through her hair as her little fat-baby girl grew pigtails and chewed on her fingers.

She asked him how he was and he thought he must have said _fine, fine, fine, fine_ until he was sick of it. So sometime when the first semester was just about over and his head was just about busting and last night’s booze was just about drowning all his better senses (still) he rolled his eyes at her curiosity and her _concern_ and said:

“Fuck, Devon, I’m an adult—I can take care of my God-damn self.”

But he meant: _stop asking questions I can’t answer_ or maybe _stop calling_. Her lower lip trembled and her eyes got all close and lethal (snake-like) and there was thunder rolling through Georgia that was far and away from sunny-perfect-San Francisco. 

His glare felt like razors in his gut until she looked to the side (away from _him_ ) and she didn’t look back at him just said: _ok, Lenny_. He thought they should give awards for guilt trips and her and _that bitch_ would tie for the prize.

\--

It went like this:

Starfleet was a peace-keeping organization dedicated to research and exploration. They _helped_ people. The thing about helping people (Leonard, can I call you Leonard?) was that to really _help someone_ you had to understand them. 

Only, the problem was:

After review of your performance this semester, it seems like you’d benefit from the experience of working with those _less privileged_. 

Because:

It’s quite evident that you’re exactly the sort that Starfleet wants. You’re just…in need of a little _perspective_.

\--

Perspective was a dank little office with mold between the tiles on the floor and real-honest-to-God door knobs. It was a satellite office of public-welfare that made sure even the poor and anonymous were allowed to get cared for. Leonard’s grasp of humanity was going to be corrected eleven PM to seven AM in the sewer of San Francisco until he realized that his life was fucking _peaches and cream_ and he had no _right_ to complain.

\--

Devon called him selfish two Sundays after he decided to stop answering her calls. Leonard sat at the table and played her left-message twice while he thought over that one real hard. He didn’t feel selfish; he just felt _used_ and that was on the good days when he didn’t even drink and didn’t even think about it.

(At least, he didn’t think about it _much_.)

He thought that selfish people didn’t trust anyone. He thought that selfish people were the ones that choked the halls and shouted their joy and elation. He thought that selfish was the sort of ruthlessly ignorant children that he’d gone to medical school with that thought decapitating statues was the highlight of the year and didn’t understand the value of _hard work_ and determination. 

He thought people like _that bitch_ that spent months sitting at his table while they were fucking someone else were _selfish_ and he damn sure wasn’t putting himself in that category. 

When he erased the message without bothering to reply, he told himself _out loud_ and _clear_ that it wasn’t selfish it was _Self Preservation_ and _everyone_ did it.

\--

If he thought about it years later (and he did sometimes), he always figured that when Jim became less of something fake and unreal and all wrong-disgusting-strange around the edges and more of something larger-than-life and _permanent_ that it happened in the Academy’s Medical Center somewhere between the cotton swabs and the display of the human body cut away from skin to bone. But if he turned it sideways—backward—if he stared and if the lights were dim and the smell of mold was tickling his nose he’d think that maybe (only _maybe_ because he was never _sure_ about anything) Jim became something _breakable_ and _human_ in the satellite office of a last-resort for anonymous faces where Leonard spent all his time searching for his humanity.

Sometimes, (eventually), he’d think it was funny. 

\--

It was his back against the wall just _throbbing_ and it was his face blushing up black-blue-red from the strike of knuckles hard enough to leave blood in his mouth. It was his wrist crushed to the wall and his ribs aching from the sharp point of an elbow holding him _right fucking there_. And it was his heart beat running around his chest like a rabbit’s last dash for life but it was this _kid’s_ blue eyes that looked like he was all out of options and it was _life_ or death.

Leonard felt everything loose and lax and useless inside of him winding up as he drew in short-shallow-pained breaths against the arm across his ribs. There was blood on the floor and blood on him and blood seeping a stain through the torn edges of Jim’s ruined shirt. Words like (let me go) and (get the fuck off) and (I’m going to call the cops) were digging into his tongue like the edge of his teeth. But (Jesus) and (what the hell _happened_ to you) were bleeding through his mouth like the bruise swelling on his cheek.

When he thought he should have fought he loosened his hands and showed his palms and said (just like a whisper): “alright. _Alright_.”

Jim looked at him once—and then twice—like he’d never trusted a man in his whole _fucking_ life and maybe he hadn’t but his hand loosened and then his arm pulled back and he wasn’t an animal but just—a hurt boy left staring at his own palms before the blood loss made him stumble backward and then he was just a body sagging against a table with his eyes half closed and his rolling back into his head.

\--

The name on the list said Dale, Hubert S. but it was James T. Kirk’s body sitting on his examination table with his white T-shirt half soaked in blood that was dripping a streak and puddle across the tile.

Leonard said: _change your name_?

_Hubert_ said: _why are you here?_

Leonard threw the PADD that he was _obligated_ to fill out by all the important regulations to one side because he had this feeling that it made _Hubert_ real nervous and there was always later to fill in the blanks and make sure all his I’s had their dots. “I don’t play nice with others,” Leonard said before he grabbed the two flaps of the ripped shirt and yanked them apart. Something ripped and something scrapped and all before he was sure what was happening there were knuckles across his face.

_Hubert_ was nothing but muscle and pure-blind-fury as he shoved him against a metal tray and sent it clattering to the floor. Then it was the wall and his skull cracking against wood-over-brick and the search-scratch-squeeze of a fist around his wrist. 

Leonard thought (through the black spots) that this right here was one of those _selfish people_ that he wasn’t and if he lived through it he just might tell Devon just how wrong she was about him.

\--

So, the thing was, back in school when he was _learning things_ all in _theory_ and not in reality there was that course on _child abuse_ that made all the pretty girls in the class cry. It wasn’t prevalent and it wasn’t popular and it wasn’t at all something that _most doctors_ were going to encounter.

Oh, not on _Earth_ but their lives could take them just about anywhere. To planets with green skies and seven moons where Daddies and Mommies beat their babies with whips-chains-and beer bottles. To scary places where living things shunned light and machinery to live like barbarians and adults-that-should-have-known-better broke bones when the little ones (that didn’t know better) didn’t listen so well. Or maybe, and there was no telling back when he was twenty-something sitting in class discussing _in theory_ to dank little offices with dizzy little lights in sunny San Fran-fucking-cisco.

But, in theory and only _in theory_ , the signs of physical abuse were always the easiest to spot. Odd shaped bruises on soft parts and odd shaped scars that looked (oh hell) like belt buckles and cigarette burns and maybe, just maybe, theory was a sick game.

Reality was a half-conscious body on a table with blood soaked down his skin until he was _pink_ and not quite _alive_ but shivering because the room was cold and he was _naked_ so there was no hiding. 

Leonard put his fingertips (but not his hand) against the body’s shoulder to push him _over_ just a little more so he could get to the newest scar. He held the split flesh with two fingers while the regenerator buzzed and clunked instead of hummed. It worked slow and that was just about _hell_ because it gave him nothing but time to peer down this body’s long back and see those mismatched long-healed stripes on his lower back.

Like a drunk little voice (or a boy in a closet) the body mumbled: “sometimes he missed.”

It sounded—and what did he know but _theory_ —like this here body hadn’t ever said that before and all Leonard wanted to do was ask _why the fuck_ it had decided to tell him _now_. He had nothing to say t made any sense so he said:

“Ok.”

-&-

_  
**side b: cold fission**   
_  
Kirk hadn’t meant to say it but it was there. Like the heavy stare of eyes greedy and gulping and the drag of a nervous tongue across blood-tinted lips. Like the butterfly-soft-light touch of fingertips against his shoulder pushing him onto his side just to see the damage but careful not to touch too long or too hard. In some part of his mind, past the exhaustion and the hate-bile-regret that he couldn’t fight (he was just tired) he convinced himself that it _mattered_.

The doctor knew.

It’d been years since gym class, in the showers, when some kid with a name that Kirk couldn’t even remember now (Landon Urie, actually) had tipped his wet head to one side and said _what are those_ and Kirk had said nothing because there was nothing to say. Old scars were forgotten scars (were they?) and someone had shouted at the kid about being a perv and nobody else had asked him so he had no answers. He had no thoughts about scars he couldn’t see and—

But the doctor knew while he stood behind the table and didn’t touch except only what he had to and hardly breathed until Kirk thought that he was just about _alone_ on the uncomfortable metal table with nothing but _thoughts_ of things and _memories_ until he might have been some boy sitting on the steps holding his breath for the first time because it _hurt_.

It hadn’t hurt in _years_. So he said: _sometimes he missed_ because Frank never _meant_ to hit the skin over his jeans where it broke apart and bled but sometimes his aim wasn’t too great and Kirk _wiggled_.

The doctor didn’t say (I see) or (I understand) or launch into a great-deep-meaningful talk about healing and souls and psychological damage. He didn’t sob and make dramatics and he didn’t let out a breath like the secret was out and everything was going to get better now.

The doctor said: “Ok.”

Kirk tipped his head in against his bent arms and smirked all up on the left side. “You are so bad at this.” He (maybe) didn’t mean to let the words through his teeth but they were as loud in the still air as his knuckles had been across the doctor’s face.

“Yeah,” he said from behind him, “well—you came to the wrong man if that’s what you want.”

\--

When it was done and he was sitting—sort of—upright on the table while the doctor washed his back like he was one of those busy-body nurses that wanted to _heal souls_ and not bodies, Kirk hung his head loose between his shoulders and thought hard about apologizing. 

Maybe.

The doctor was coming around in front of him, all careful now because he had a bruise across his face that looked out of place over his clean-shaven jaw and under his combed-neat-parted hair. (Kirk liked him better like he was on that shuttle, spitting hateful words about a woman without a name, sharing alcohol and smelling like ass and dirt and dog.) “Here,” he said and handed him the washcloth. 

Kirk took it and dropped it and stared at it because his fingers had curled and it wasn’t such a big deal to hang onto it. The doctor was frowning at it while he reached over to the bowl to pick up another. “Sorry,” Kirk said (and he meant _for hitting you_ and _for telling you_ ) but not for dropping a rag. 

“You need to eat,” the good doctor said, “and you need to sleep. And I’m going to give you a hypospray.”

“Ok.”

Kirk got stared at and the doctor washed his shoulder until the crusted blood was just about gone and the sticky spill was a pink rinse. When it was passable—but not exactly clean—he was left wobbling on the edge of the table watching through slow-dry eyes why the doctor unlocked the cabinet and pulled out the little vials until he found one he liked. 

He came back with slow steps and a careful hand against the side of Kirk’s neck like (don’t hit me) he was still afraid of hurting him. The press of the hypospray was a cold kiss and then a sting that hardly felt like pain. His heart jolted and then sighed right back to normal rhythm. The doctor was close enough to smell, all brushing against his knees and not quite letting go of him. 

Two fingers at his pulse and nothing but the weight of—something—hanging over his shoulders until Kirk was beat down and _too tired_ to deal with it. “Do you like meatloaf?” the doctor asked him.

“ _What_?”

\--

It was Edna’s _all night, late night_ Diner. McCoy (because he wasn’t too bad, really, man should have a name) was holding his elbow in a light grip because his feet were weaving instead of going straight. The waitress blowing bubbles with her gum let him in and told them where to sit. 

McCoy’s accent was slipping all over his words until Kirk couldn’t understand every-other-one of them and figured that was the difference between Northern ears and Southern tongues. “You talk slow,” he said when his elbows were on the table and he wanted to put his head with them and sleep. It made sense now (maybe) all that talk of _drawls_ because McCoy talked just like that word, just let that aw hang in the air and forget the ls. 

“Put your head down,” was understandable enough. So was the blank darkness that followed the command.

\--

It was glass-on-wood that woke him. Metal-on-glass that broke through the fog of near-consciousness. McCoy was talking southern to some girl that curled her fingers and chewed her gum and wanted to kiss him like a hooker until she sucked his every word right off his tongue and into her belly so she could be half as interesting as that.

Kirk blinked at the lump of meatloaf and the mountain of potatoes and the strange spew of some-fucking-vegetable on the platter this place called a plate and then over at the coffee cup caught in one of McCoy’s hand. “What are you eating?” he asked.

“Nothing,” was the blunt smack of an answer, “but you are.”

There was a towel and a bag of ice on the table and that strange pink-cold look to McCoy’s cheek like he’d been trying to temper the damage far too late to make a difference. He just picked up his cup and sipped it like it was hot but there was no steam. 

Kirk wanted to scream _don’t feel sorry for me_ across the table at the bastard because he hadn’t meant to _say anything_ but it was there now. McCoy knew and it was in his eyes and the grim set of his mouth as he bit back all his curiosities.

Or maybe he didn’t want to know.

Nobody did. (Not really.)

\--

Later—maybe years later—Kirk would figure it out. Why Bones stayed with him in that diner, sitting across the table shifting in his seat because he _knew now_ and there was no way to take it back. At the time it seemed like nothing more than obligation and cruelty and all he wanted was _the fuck_ away from there.

\--

“You know,” McCoy offered after his second cup was half empty and Kirk’s plate was about three-quarters cleaned. “If you come to the Academy’s Medical Center, I can heal those scars—all of them, actually.”

It seemed like one of those real sweet offers that people with _good intentions_ made to poor-abused-kids like him. So he could fit in all neat and tidy around the edges with all the other kids that didn’t care much about whether or not someone was going to figure out that curl of a brownish scar across his lower back was because he went off and _broke a plate_ and Frank didn’t care that it was on purpose or not.

Kirk was chewing but the food was puke in his mouth as he turned to stare out the window at the black-turning-gray pre-dawn sky. A couple hours ago he was in a bar with a thing that wasn’t human and his two thugs that didn’t much care about how brawls were fists-knees and elbows and not knives and broken bottles. Everything was fight-survive-live and now he was in a diner spitting half mashed-food into a napkin thinking (there are worse things) and shaking his head.

“What good are they doing you?” was as hard as the kiss of knuckles on cheek bones.

Just then, as he slid out of the booth and up to his still-unsteady feet, he didn’t much give a damn if he ever saw the bastard doctor again. He (hated him) left him there with the check and didn’t utter so much as a _thank you_ and didn’t let it bother him either.

\--

Top of the Class was one of those titles that kids with pushy parents cared about. Kirk had watched them back in high school struggling under the weight of _expectations_ until they were little old men and little old women at seventeen just looking for their first chance _out_. It was alcohol and smokes and wiggly-giggly pleasures until all that beautiful _potential_ was nothing more than rote recitation of passages in books. Now and again, there was the one in the front of the class with their hand in the air asking _another question_ while Kirk stared out windows and dreams of (far away) better things. Those ones were the ones that cared about where they went.

One or two of those had to have ended up here four years ago, in these dorms, sitting on these beds, staring at these books, memorizing and thinking and processing and turning blank words into real meaning until it _made sense_. Kirk’s father had been one of those people (or so they say). He had the drive and will and determination. It meant something to him to get that shiny top score and every victory was celebrated with the preparation for another.

Kirk tossed top grades to the side like bits of trash because he _didn’t work_ too hard to get it and there just was no appreciating what came easy. He sat on his dorm bed thinking about whether or not his father had been on this bed—in this building—in this class or looking at these words having heavy thoughts about them. If maybe it hadn’t made sense—just this passage—or this one.

It distracted him on good days and made him mad on bad ones.

\--

_Captain_ Pike wrote a damn good paper about Kirk’s father. The only thing was—it had nothing to do with how the man lived and all about how he died. 

Or maybe the thing was: Kirk hadn’t ever put too much thought into that. Maybe, as he sat in the Academy’s big-broad-bright library with the PADD in his lap and his hand across his mouth sucking down word-after-word about the Kelvin and all the events that came together in one crystal moment of fate (and death), it was the was first time he’d even _considered_ it. He carried the thought with him on top of (sometimes he missed) and (what good are they doing you) and (let me suck your dick) and (don’t give up, Jim).

When he was in his skinny bed at night, wearing his standard-issue pajamas and watching the ceiling stand still he thought about what his father must have thought about. He thought about how—in space—there was no sound at all.

\--

Exams came at the end of the semester and the nervous bodies around him were leaking sweat into the collars of their tight-red-shirts while he sat in his seat tapping the stylus against the edge of the PADD just waiting for someone else to turn their exam in first. 

\--

The file existed; it was only a matter of finding it. Starfleet was the shrewd sort of establishment that wasn’t going to erase something just because _someone died_. No, the way Kirk figured it, there were a swarm of communication officers that had spent weeks listening to that file over and over and over—toying with this over that and trying to make out some shred of sense from a senseless death. Maybe they got so used to the tearing of the ship and the crackling static of the explosions that they forgot to listen to the sound of his father dying.

Maybe Kirk was nothing but a fool for even searching for it but he _wanted_ to hear it. He wanted (needed) to know what his father said when he knew that his life was over and that was it—no more and good bye. 

He hacked the library files and found nothing. He sat in his room and walked the campus and he _ran_ with a crowd of other men in gray sweaters and long pants. He toyed with notions of stupidity, he got drunk on a Thursday and fucked a girl with strawberry-lemonade colored hair until she squealed and called him _wild_ and then he made it up to her with his tongue and fingers and she called him _oh baby_.

He accepted his demerits for his conduct and he said he understood that if he got more he’d be sent out to work them off—and it’d go on his _permanent record_. 

\--

On a Saturday, with drizzle at the window, he called Winona. She nodded her head and said _are you sure_ when she should have told him _hell no_. Maybe she should have lied and said (no, I don’t have it). Maybe she shouldn’t have carried it with her everywhere she went—maybe Kirk couldn’t look at her like she couldn’t look at him.

_Did_ he asked with a stutter, _has Sam ever heard it?_

Winona said no like it _meant something_ that this was _all theirs_. 

\--

Kirk listened to his father die with _I love you_ on his lips and the blank-white-static of death clipping his words off half spoken.

\--

“Jesus Christ, Jimmy,” was a voice that he didn’t recognize breaking through the dense nothing of what he figured was sleep and felt like it might have been assisted by some amount of alcohol or another. It rolled down his spine and through his guts until he was scratching fingernails into something cold and solid that felt a lot like a floor but didn’t seem familiar enough to be _his_ floor. 

Jim lifted his head up only far enough to turn it and found himself squinting up at a dead man that looked only a little bit like he couldn’t have been _anyone-but-George_. His eyebrows squinting was stabs of pain through his skull and he lapped his tongue across his lips and tasted blood. So he closed his eyes again and put his head back on the floor where it was cold (even if it was hard). All the words in the world broke down and he didn’t know a single fucking thing to say so he said what that little-boy-named-Jim used to say.

“Sam?”

“Je _sus_ Christ,” came again and then a hand on his forehead and a body next to him and it sounded like someone was crying and he couldn’t figure out who the hell would waste tears like that—but something familiar and warm and long-since-lost was right next to him again.

He was half drunk and all hurt and Sam had an arm around him like they were little boys and not grown men that didn’t know a damn thing about one another. Something like metal-on-metal slammed and Kirk thought (I’m in jail) but it didn’t matter. He said: “I wish I met him,” because he never got to say it before.

“Jim,” Sam said and he kissed his forehead like it would push the words away but all it did was leave a smear of dry-damp and a print of new pain.

\--

They called it _emotional stress_ and he didn’t get demerits because Sam was some slick blue-shirted researcher that could talk fast and smart and was the son of a _hero_ that was long since forgotten. If Winona bothered to put in two cents—Kirk didn’t hear them but he watched Captain Pike walking out of the room where they were deciding his fate.

He sat in his chair and looked at his red knees while Pike shook his big-brother’s hand and offered that same spiel about how fantastic and _wonderful_ their father was. When it was his turn to look the captain in the eye he felt _ashamed_ of himself in a strange kind of way that made him wonder what Grandpa Tiberius must have thought.

Pike didn’t say _be better than this_ and he didn’t say _I know you can_ but he shook Kirk’s hand the same way he had Sam’s and of all the meaningless things—that meant something. Pike said: “I heard you were outnumbered five to one,” like that was worth noting.

“Six,” Kirk said. The one sneaky bastard in the corner had sucker punched him when his back was turned.

“You think that’s impressive?” Pike asked.

“Not really,” Kirk said.

Pike nodded like saying (well, it’s not) and then he reached over to some anxious looking girl in a gray one-piece that handed a PADD over to him without another word. “Read this,” he said. Then he was gone with a click of _very important_ heels off to do something more worthy of his time.

\--

Sam had a hand on each of Kirk’s shoulders, just staring at him out on the lawn of the campus when it was time for (good bye) and there was something strange about his face that wasn’t-quite-right or he’d be a perfect copy of their father. He took a breath and he let it out and he said:

_I shouldn’t have left you_.

Kirk rolled his eyes and shrugged the hands off him and looked _that way_ because looking forward meant he agreed. Agreeing meant— “Fuck off,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Jim,” Sam said, “God damn, you don’t know how sorry I am.”

“I haven’t seen you in ten years, Sam, I think I know how fucking sorry you are.” He looked back at his brother—at that face that wasn’t quite his father’s (at his brother who damn sure _wasn’t_ his father) and he stood his ground. It was in his chest and trembling in his arms. “Who sent you?”

Sam had the grace to look ashamed of himself. “Mom called me. Hell, Jim, she was going to steal a shuttle.” (Because she would and maybe they both knew it.) 

Kirk nodded and he wanted to _go_ but Sam caught him and hugged him like he could squeeze sense and reason into something. Kirk slapped his back because it was his _brother_ and Sam looked pink around the eyes and nose when he moved back.

_Call me_ , he said.

Kirk didn’t say: _I made it this far without you_.

\--

That PADD that Pike handed him was one article another about his parents—life, death, childhood and future. There were pictures of his mother with dark rings around her blue-blue eyes and her arms wrapped around a bundle of blankets with a wild-animals’ fierce determination to protect. In the caption under it they called him a _miracle_ they said he was the reason his father _died_ to _save him_ and those other people.

They told long stories about George like he was still living—starting in grade school and a Starfleet presentation and graduation and his assignment and ending with that same clipped inevitability of his death. They mentioned passing things about Winona and how she was the daughter of a _Starfleet Captain_ and how he had died tragically. They called her a survivor and they called her resilient. They called her everything but a walking tragedy.

(Because that was all they were.)

\--

Kirk was twenty three (imagine that) standing buck naked in front of the mirror, running his hand across the scar on his hip thinking about broken bottles and Iowa and things that he was and things that he wanted to be. 

He let the words _resilient_ and _emotional stress_ bang around in his head until he was half-deaf from them before he raised his hand to touch his shoulder where _no scar_ was. Then the other things lay down and were quiet for a minute because it was his hand over _his skin_ and Winona-George-Sam had nothing to do with it. 

This was his. 

Wherever he went from here— _this_ was all his.

\--

“No,” he said to the insistent nurse _again_ , “I need Dr. McCoy.”

She was shaking her head like _don’t you know he’s the_ mean _one_? Saying things like (we have several doctors working today) like he was going to take the hint because with his shirt up to his neck and his smile on his face he looked just like any other cute boy. Just an innocent boy that needed to know that _nobody_ wanted Dr. McCoy.

He nodded his head and he said: “I need Dr. McCoy,” all over again until she sighed like agreeing to euthanize him and put his name down on the list. 

_It’ll be just a moment_ was telling him _get your affairs in order_.

\--

McCoy was sitting on the spinning doctor’s stool when the nurse opened the door to the exam room and motioned him inside without intent to follow. McCoy spun around in the seat and stopped himself with a squeak of rubber against the floor and an upshot of one eyebrow that made his face look crooked in a stupid kind of way. 

“Hubert,” he said.

Kirk breathed a half-laugh because it was ridiculous and he couldn’t half remember why he was here. “Jim,” he said.

“You should stop changing your name,” McCoy said as he stood up. He glanced at the nurse that all but ran as soon as she was spotted and the door shut when her finger let go of the override holding it open. They were alone in the room with no windows and the bright-white walls. “I heard about your fight.”

“I didn’t think they made that public knowledge,” Kirk said.

“The names weren’t but some hot-shit kid takes on six in a bar?” McCoy said with a shrug, “sounded like you.”

That laugh was real and Kirk shrugged like it didn’t matter (because it didn’t). “I heard a volcano erupted in Hawaii and figured that sounded like _you_.”

McCoy snorted. “I’m more like a bear-mauling in Nebraska,” he said. When the laughter they weren’t sharing died he cleared his throat and crossed his arms and said blunt and _outright_ : “why are you here? Crotch rot? Gut wound?”

“Cosmetic surgery,” Kirk said.


	4. gray, quiet and tired and mean/take your stand and sing your protest

**_side a: gray, quiet and tired and mean_**  
There he was at twenty-fucking-eight, in his tiny stall of a shower, jacking off to thoughts of nothing at all important. Every motion mechanical search for something tingling and warm like golden sunshine through green leaves and creepy-crawly little caterpillars with black feet that liked the smell of _smoke_ as it breezed right out of Leonard and straight up to the sky. 

Down stroke was the thought that his hands were stupid-soft like women’s hands and always cooler than the average touch. It wasn’t anything to him because he spent all his time touching cold metal and cold walls and sitting at cold desks waiting for his humanity to drag its beaten-bedraggled-long unwanted self into the little clinic called _perspective_. Sometimes and now and again, he found himself stroking keys on a board or gripping a stylus writing away _deep thoughts_ that felt like he lifted them off bus routes because his soul damn sure wasn’t producing them.

Ethics was a funny thing when you didn’t really _care_.

Up-stroke was the thought that most men didn’t consider soullessness when they were masturbating but there it was. A little lonely itch in the base of his belly said (keep going, just keep going) and his elbow as aching against the edge of the shower as the water was running less-than-hot now. He stared at his closed eyelids until he was dizzy from a burst of rainbow-colors. So he thought ruthlessly of his history teacher who looked good with her breasts stretching that black fabric taut until nobody much cared what she was saying. He chased dirty thoughts around his head like a circling cyclone and when he hit the ground all he could think was:

 _Her_ , on her knees by the couch with her clever-long-fingers curling under the waist band of his shorts to ease them down and how she’d lap the corner of her mouth as she leaned forward to kiss his belly button and lick her way right on down. He was breathless and she was beautiful until his mouth was watering and he still remembered what her breath smelled like when she was panting against his cheek and whispering his name like: ( _Leonard, oh—Leonard—_ please).

Tim must have been a better fuck.

The thought shot up and down his spine until it was his fist against the shower wall and not around his dick and fuck this because his body was _hardwired_ to hers. He hit the controls until the water was _ice_ cold and shivered and shook until it washed away every thought and left him with nothing but pale-pale-chilled skin.

\--

Sooner (or later, much later), Leonard would forget all about the novelty of seeing Jim naked because it happened _all the time_ and more often than that too. But _then_ , in a tiny exam room in the Academy with nothing but a thin sheet of metal that slid on a frame all _automatically_ separating them from _everyone_ , it was a brand new shiver of fear.

Jim peeled his clothes off, shirt and then pants and stood in his gray underpants and white socks with two heavy arms across his chest caught somewhere between ashamed and determined. Leonard looked at his scars and it was _all_ he could _see_. 

_Where do you want me_? Jim asked him.

Leonard smacked his hand against the table and shook it out of his head—this thing, this unreal and unbelievable thing that stood in front of him shrieking to be _acknowledged_ and was going to go one more day getting ignored. He didn’t think (why the fuck did you chose me) because it had been his big idea when he didn’t half know what he was getting into.

Jim sat on the table, hands on his knees, shoulder-blades pointing and back hunched forward. He was small and too-damn-big all at once. 

\--

It was Granny and not Devon that sent him a message that said things like:

 _If you’re not too busy_ and _sure would love to see you_ and signed it off with a flourish of cursive that left him feeling starved and _alone_ in all sorts of curious ways that only a boy could be. He thought that he should write her back and say:

 _No I’m busy_.

Then again, his Granny taught him that there was no point in lying because he was nothing but bad at it. The thing was, she told him when he was half a boy, he was born with a big heart and a good soul and little boys with big hearts and good souls couldn’t lie worth a damn. (That just said quite a lot about people like _the bitch_ and how their hearts had to be pea-sized and their souls as black as soot.) McCoys, well they were all born with big hearts and good souls and that was why there wasn’t a liar in the bunch so he had a lot to live up to.

Leonard looked at the message until his eyes were dry (but not wet) and couldn’t think of a thing to say that didn’t make his heart do funny things (because they were all lies) so he didn’t say anything at all. Not (I miss you) and not (I think about you) and not (I don’t think I can ever come home again).

He wrote: _I don’t have a home_ on a scrap of nothing and the big-black-bold letters sang like little birds in the trees until his ears bled.

\--

The wood was rough under the table and the stain might have been light once but it was torn apart by spills of alcohol blue-red-green-neon pink and scuffed by heels, elbows and fists. There were dents under his hand that were left over from long shots and contests and he turned his tumbler in a circle of condensation while he considered it.

There was no reason not to—that was what he told himself again and again while he sat there in shadows watching bodies move through the motions of meeting-flirting-mating. One girl with sparkly bangles up and down her arms was twisting in slow-motion to the drag of sweat-soaked music and the two men rocking against her were thinking (I’d fuck her) until they were doing it right there in front of everyone. Leonard figured someone should have told them that things like that belonged behind closed doors, under covers and women weren’t things you fucked because men should be gentlemen.

He swallowed a mouthful just to make his lips hum and his muscles loosen—things tilted to the left and he was stroking the table top like it was his lost lover, tapping his thumb against it off beat to the music and dancing along with his down-turned dirty thoughts. He watched throats and hands and hips rotating because when he thought of sex he thought of (whimpers) voices and (fingernails) hands and (her) soft skin. There were dozens of women in the bar, a few more hanging around the exit, one with her coat on ready-to-go and Leonard thought that was the best idea anyone ever had.

\--

Leonard didn’t find his humanity in the dank hole of a doctor’s office but he found death. It was working-alone from eleven to seven because no nurse was going to put up with him and he _didn’t care_ because alone was solitude and that was quiet. There wasn’t anyone to _try_ for so he didn’t exhaust himself holding it back. 

Most nights it was sitting at the desk until the drunk-and-brawling crowd rolled in through the doors needing quick fixes for bad drugs or bad fights and he handed them out in small plastic cups. The monotony left him dull and numb while he stared at his assignment and tried to imagine what the fuck an _idol_ was and if it meant _role model_ and figured that Starfleet wanted some sick-sweet paper about _famous people_ when Leonard couldn’t stop thinking about his grandmother.

Now there was a woman that deserved to be a role model—sweet-spoken, soft-toned, always-forgiving magic woman that went off and lived through the death of her husband and son and daughter in law and raised two sad kids to full-grown adults but had the time and energy to bake pies and biscuits and fed half the neighborhood kids along with all of her own.

The door was kicked open and someone was screaming bones-over-skin as they dragged a half-unconscious body in through the doors. He was on his feet as the chaos started spin. The moldy tile floor soaked up blood and vomit as the body convulsed until it was close to breaking. 

Leonard was on his knees getting _filthy_ not thinking about (standard precautions) disease because the body was a woman high on bad drugs, beaten by bad men, and seven months pregnant with a dying baby. He was fucking _alone_.

“What did she take?” he demanded across the body at the woman wearing the skirt that didn’t cover her ass. Her white knees were hard against the bloody floor. Her mouth was hanging open, eyes glazed and her multi-colored fingernails sparkled in the dim light. “Damn it,” Leonard shouted at her, “what did she _fucking_ take?”

Not that it mattered but he was scraping his way back to his feet, fumble-fingered grabbing vials and stuffing them into his pockets—the hypospray and hitting the ground with a tricorder in hand. Her heartbeat was thud-thud-thudthudthud until it was fit to explode and he had a hypospray for that but it was all _symptoms_ and no cause.

He heard the door slamming before he saw the half-naked woman leave and then he was all-alone just like he _liked it_ with a dead woman still half-alive. He ran his hand across her swollen belly and didn’t look at her face because it was black-blue and white froth rolling out from between her lips. Her limbs jittering and her heart was going (thud-thud-thudthudthud) all to hell. 

There were no choices when he grabbed her chin and her swollen-glazed-dead-dying eyes looked at him like she saw anything at all. “I can save your baby,” he said to her. He _meant_ it but she coughed white-foam and blood-flakes into his face to clear her throat.

Her hand across her belly was weak and worthless as she wheezed: _save_ me.

“You’re dead,” he said right to her face. 

Then she was and she took her baby with her.

\--

The _formal_ review came at the end of the week and it went something like:

You didn’t do anything wrong.

Said all in technical long-winded words that were spoken like a death sentence peppered with an uplifting sermon about human faith and he couldn’t take this _to heart_ because horrible things happened sometimes without reason. There was _no way_ to save that woman and they all knew it—she’d been poisoned and beaten and even if the child had survived it would have had _severe birth defects_.

Maybe, the official word was, it was better that the child didn’t have to suffer.

Leonard sat in his seat with his lips glued shut in front of his shivering-tight-teeth and wanted to scream _fuck you_ at every single one of them for being blank-faced and impassive. Someone had died and it wasn’t like it was the first time that someone died and it wasn’t like it was going to be the last time but it _should matter_ and they stared at him with blank and reassuring faces telling him not to let it get him down.

Not to take it personally.

Things like this—well, they happen all the time. Even if he hadn’t _been alone_ she would have died. Because there just was no saving those that didn’t want to be saved.

\--

The next day the sun rose as a testament to life that kept right on trudging along. Leonard had a paper due and sleep he had to catch up on.

Mostly, a woman and her baby were dead but he wasn’t thinking about that.

\--

Research was done at the library but Starfleet Academy’s definition of a library was long-tall-straight displays of glowing screens that listed texts available for download on your standard-issue data PADD. All you had to have was the cord that connected one to the other. 

Leonard walked down the aisles to find one that looked about half relevant—searching by time period to find someone that he figured was worthy enough to consider a _role model_ when his brain was wrapped around how much blood could get caked under your fingernails and what it must be like to suffocate before you were even born. Maybe. Maybe he was thinking about Georgia like a lost security blanket and having nightmares about a skinny boy in footie-pajamas that buried his teddy bear because his _Mommy died_ and there wasn’t nobody in the world that could tell him _why_.

He was trailing his fingers across the cold metal of the shelf-end going around to the next aisle and stopped short at the turn. Down the length of the carpet there was Jim Kirk sitting cross legged with a PADD in his lap and another two at his side. He was reading-reading-reading over something all serious and all quiet. Tongue-over-lips as his finger grazed the screen to scroll up or down. The world (all for a second) seemed at peace.

Leonard must have shifted because he was being stared at and it was the same stare of a cornered animal when Jim saw him at first before it tempered down into a smile. “The old sawbones,” Jim said.

“Sawbones?” Leonard asked.

“It’s—they used to call surgeons sawbones.” The way he said it was sighing about how smart people were not anymore. Must be hard to be the only genius in a crowd of mundane and average little fools all trying to meet some standard.

“During the American Civil War, right?” Leonard said because he’d been at school for a damn-long-time learning every pointless thing one needed to know about being a doctor. He damn well knew what cavemen used to do to treat splinters and the knowledge was crowded like stuffed cotton between his ears—shuffled back and forgotten because there were more important things to consider.

Jim grinned with one half of his mouth as he shifted his opinion a little toward favorable (and what difference did _that_ make) as he nodded. “Yeah, mostly. Dickens used it before then though.”

“Dickens?” Leonard repeated.

“Charles,” Jim agreed. Just like that, Leonard was an idiot again and that was alright. Knowing everything meant having nothing left to learn. Jim licked his lips and saved his place and looked around the empty aisle like he wasn’t too sure he wanted to be alone with this man.

(Leonard wondered, just once, if that was because he’d been _abused_ and the thought left him sick in the stomach.) “I don’t know him.”

“I figured.” 

There just wasn’t much left to say to that and besides Jim just-remembered that there was somewhere _else_ he probably should be so he was _leaving_ and then _gone_.

\--

 _Hey_ the nurse named Christine said from the doorway of Leonard’s very own exam room. Her voice was a quiet little lilt of a girl that had been humiliated before and didn’t quite want to have it happen twice but her eyes were all sloped sad-like to one side as her long fingers played at the door frame. She was nervous like a flower in the breeze and it left Leonard feeling like (an ass) a bastard. “I heard what happened,” she whispered.

He stared at her because the things knocking around his head were _good for fucking you_ and _so_ and neither of them quite said (I didn’t do anything and that’s why they died). Instead of opening his mouth he lifted his shoulders and let them sag again like a shrug that didn’t half acknowledge that doctors shouldn’t _let people die_. 

The nurse named _Christine_ didn’t like that and it was easy to tell because it shot through her body like a whip cracking until she found her backbone and it jerked her up straight. Her cheeks blushed up rosy with anger and not embarrassment. “I thought you cared.” 

It might have been the bravest thing that she ever did her whole life.

Leonard stood up, jacket falling straight from his shoulders and folded his arms over his chest with a vicious tightness. There was nothing _good_ to say so he said _nothing_ good at all. “Caring isn’t going to save them. They’re dead.”

She had that slapped-cheek look to her as she recoiled from the doorway and him and everything that he said (but didn’t mean) and she said with a hiss like a _snake_ : “I’m sorry I said anything.”

Well, that was two of them.

\--

It was Saturday, sweat-drenched, half-dressed and he was just about all-drunk and more lonely and that combination was sneaky and dangerous. It wriggled under his skin until he couldn’t keep himself quite in his chair but he didn’t know what the hell came next. It’d been more years than he could count on both hands since the last time he’d flirted with something in a skirt so short. Last time he was a kid and now he was all full-grown with no better ideas.

His cheeks were rough and his clothes were wrinkled and there was beer on his boots and whiskey on his breath but he found himself next to some girl with bubble-gum-pink fingernails who lapped a not-quite-pink tongue against her plum-colored lips and eyed him past her sparkly mascara. 

_I’m Lauren_ she said when he was expecting something like Fiona or Apple or Trinity Prefect. Her pinkie stuck out and touched his and he lifted an eyebrow at that and stared at how she was biting her lower lip. The little crowd of women standing at her side were chuckling, giggling, whispering among themselves like rating his performance. 

_Leonard_ , he said back. Then he offered to buy her a drink because that was how he remembered it—or heard it—and she glanced back to her crowd to check his rating and it wasn’t like the bar was overcrowded with eligible bachelors. He rolled his eyes and said: “I’m a doctor.”

Just like that, just like all the boys in medical school always said, she was suddenly _interested_.

“Really?” she said back with hair twirled around her fingertips. “Sugar, you can buy me anything.”

It shouldn’t, he thought, have been that easy but it was so they were at the bar ordering drinks from a man with big-big ears who eyed them like they were that odd looking standing next to one another. Leonard frowned around the rim of his cup but smiled when she talked (only that felt stupid so he decided on nodding). 

Her drink was half gone and she was leaning close to whisper: _let’s get out of here_.

\--

Sex was a wriggling weird thing that made no sense in that unfamiliar-way that nothing quite made sense anymore. Her skin was warm and smooth and she pulled him down and kissed him like no good-girl ever should. This wasn’t love or marriage but blind lust and it left him tingling and shivering and _hard_ but he wasn’t half sure he liked it.

When he spread his hand across the inside of her thigh and pushed her knee against the bed—it was his tongue and her gasps and she _writhed_ for him because he always liked that best. When she was praising Jesus and God and whimpering (fuck, fuck, fuck) he kissed her trembling belly and licked her sweat-shined skin until she was digging fingernails into his neck-back-shoulders just to get at his mouth. Her tongue was hungry for the taste of her own orgasm so he let her take what she wanted until he had just about nothing left to give.

Her knees were hard knobs but her body was snug and warm and he fit inside of her like it _meant something_ but it didn’t because she was sobbing nobody’s name and come morning she’d be gone and onto the next man clever enough to say _I’m a doctor_ even if he wasn’t. Leonard hated her even as he slid into her body, even as his hands moved like they always (always) did gliding across skin because touching was loving and he hadn’t ever touched someone he didn’t love.

But her, this one, _Lauren_.

He kind of hated her under him all pink and wet and when he came he had to bite his tongue because his brain and throat and body were all _hard-wired_ to whisper (Joss). There was blood on his lips, forehead against her collarbone, knees and hips just quivering in place for all the effort it took. Her fingers were through his hair and then it was over.

“You can do me any time,” she said with a pant and closed eyes all dark around the edges.

“Thanks,” he muttered and pushed himself back-away-and sat on the edge of the bed.

“You can do me again now,” she said like conversation. Then, with no good sense or shame she added: “You don’t have to be so gentle either.”

\--

Leonard fucked her again. He _fucked_ her. Like f and then u and ck with an ‘ed at the end and it hurt like blisters on his feet but she screamed like one long orgasm that broke and snapped and swept her body in a riptide from start to finish. 

\--

He made it to a bench. His bench—a common bench—he sat there a lot with dew-wet elbows watching the world turn because it was set in a park away from the granite of the city where something green was still given license to grow. It smelled like turned earth and wriggling worms and even if it wasn’t home (because nowhere was home now) it was close enough he could pretend. 

Leonard fell onto the bench like his legs were giving out and he kept thinking (breathe) and he still couldn’t (could _not_ ) because all at once and _suddenly_ it was nothing he could ignore now. He was half-in, half-out of his clothes with his shirt unbuttoned down his chest over an under shirt and Lauren-with-no-last-name’s perfume leaving him smelling like something filthy while her half-moon shaped fingernails had left marks on his back he could still feel.

He was sitting on solid wood hearing squeaking springs of the mattress as he _fucked_ her and he couldn’t—(could NOT)—get the thoughts of Jocelyn out of his brain until she wasn’t _some bitch_ but his fucking _wife_ who had fucked someone else night-after-fucking-night and come home to eat dinner at the table with _him_ like she could do that. Like someone hadn’t ever told her it was _wrong_ , like she needed just to be fucked (like that? Like he fucked Lauren? Like she was nothing and worthless and just a fucking _hole_ that was slick enough?). 

It was breaking over him like that—like he hadn’t loved her enough, like she hadn’t loved _him_ enough and if she hadn’t or if he hadn’t then it was ten-eleven-twelve fucking years of his life he’d spent fool-stupid and he couldn’t (wouldn’t) make himself believe it but it _was_. 

He saw her at the table with her fingers spread and her skirt pulled flat and her voice saying (I’m fucking Tim, Leonard) and it was just like that. It was f-u-ck-ing and no love or comfort or satisfaction in it at all. 

It was elbows on knees and his fists in his hair and the hot-salt-tracks of tears down his throat because he was nothing but a boy again, all at once, and this was his fucking _life_ and he’d lost his fucking _wife_ to some big-dicked real-estate man who probably fucked her like a _dog_ and she loved it or didn’t but she needed it because somewhere (oh anywhere) along the line he didn’t (couldn’t) give it to her like that.

Love wasn’t sex but sex wasn’t love and what did it fucking matter because _this_ was his fucking _life_ and people were dying while Officials were telling him things like _perspective_ and _hope_ and _humanitarian_ but he didn’t feel a fucking thing until he did and when he did—

It was the curl of lips like the world’s most psychotic smile and his eyes were shut and his teeth were cold because his breath was sucking in breezes and his chest was aching just because—fists against his forehead and then against his leg and he was beating at nothing and everything and it was _over_.

Over.

Jocelyn was gone and it was final and he’d signed away those years of his life when he signed her away but it was months ago and months before that before it sank through his skull so he was right back in that ratty-ass apartment that he worked his ass off just to keep. She was in the doorway looking at him, begging to be forgiven for needing something he wasn’t giving but he was asking himself _how_ she could have done it.

He thought of dusty pottery and her strained-fake-pressed smiles. 

_Fuck_ he spit into his fist and into the air and into the tears on his cheeks that he couldn’t squeeze right back into his skull. 

Nothing felt nothing—he wanted nothing—he _had_ nothing and it was big and bright and all encompassing until he was fucking _nothing_ and he just couldn’t take it—

“Hey,” came the scared voice of a boy in the closet and Leonard _remembered_ that as he lifted his head and saw the kid with the blue eyes standing two arms away from him. Jim Kirk with fists in his pockets and shoulders up around his ears as he hovered the line between walking back the way he came without being noticed and throwing himself straight into a fight he couldn’t possibly win. There was nothing feral in his eyes now. Something weary, something that _understood_ and then it wasn’t two arms away but one and then not one because there were fingers on his shoulder. 

Leonard shoved him back.

Jim must never have learned a God-damn thing in his life because he was back again and it wasn’t a soft and gentle touch but the hard grab of too-strong hands on his arm and his shirt and there was no choice so Leonard didn’t try to make one. He said: “I loved her,” because he had, because he did, because it hurt him.

Jim was half sitting next to him, holding him in a stiff-arm hug and he must have thought he was funny because he turned his head toward Leonard’s face and said: “Ok.”

\--

 _Here_ , Jim said pushing the red-plastic cup into his hand. Like it was going to make something better or stay the flow just for now. He had another in his other hand and a nervous shift from one heel to the other. He said, _tell me where you live_ and when Leonard demanded to know why, Jim scratched the back of his neck just under his hairline and said: “Because, once you start drinking this you’re not going to remember.”

So it was something worth swallowing for a change. Served out of a barrel on the back of a truck by a man with a beard and a crowd of drunk students and patrons. 

Jim looked like he’d been here before and might come back again. For now he nodded his head while Leonard rattled off his room number and building and then it was one sip-one gulp-another and three more too. Everything that was raw and aching was burned by the slip of alcohol until he thought he was in the grass singing sad songs to caterpillars with black feet.

\--

When up was down and sideways was caddy-cornered, Leonard was pretty sure his hands were doing funny things like telling jokes against skin and cloth until nobody was quite laughing. Everyone (not everyone because there was _no one_ ) was breathing hard like effort and his feet just weren’t in on _this party_ because they had better places to go or no place to go at all. Walking was effort and his fucking feet would rather be fucking Tim like his fucking wife.

Not _his_ wife (anymore) but they were _his_ feet.

At least, before one glass of the red shit and two of the blue he was sure they were his feet and now he thought that they might have been someone else’s feet—might be that you could divorce feet like you divorced wives but that made no sense because he never laid over his feet trembling because (it was _just too much_ like the heroine in a romance novel) like he did his wife. If he never promised his feet nothing like forever and after sickness and health and long-hours-spent working too then it didn’t matter if he didn’t keep up his end of the deal.

So, maybe his feet were nothing but ungrateful bitches and they needed to get with the party because it was going _that way_. Then again, maybe the important thing was white-gold skin under his hand and the stretch of cotton being pulled by drunken-giggling-fingers that just _wouldn’t quit_ and his ears were swimming along with his brain.

His eyes spun like tilt-o-whirlies until he just closed them and burst into a _fit_ of fucking _giggles_ , falling forward and pitching to the side. There was a heavy sigh and a heavy thud and he thought he was on the ground but his feet were still going and something ripped because he had cotton in one fist and the dim-impression of a frowning face above him.

It was _fucking hilarious_.

“Drugs are bad for you,” was all serious, serious business sounding. The warning of a surgeon general talking about smoking and birth defects back in the day when birth defects were something that couldn’t be cured.

He was on his back against something that felt like hallway, one knee against the wall just cracking his face in two because it was _funny_ see? He thought his mouth was working like a river pouring right out of his chest but he had no idea what he was saying because it was all _caterpillars_ , man and they _understood_.

Hands were pulling and he was flying and that was just fine too.

When his back hit the bed through the open doors he had one hand full of hair and one full of anything that didn’t feel like it was going to rip—jacket and then jeans and it wasn’t appropriate. He thought he said, _it’s not like that_

or maybe

 _just stay_.

\--

It was, almost approximately but not quite exactly, eleven months, three weeks and five days since he woke up next to his wife with the soft-fleece-blanket belief that he was in love _forever_ and the easy warm comfort of security that came with that thought. He hadn’t woken up half numb and all awkward because another body was wrapped so close to his everything was a layer of sweat-glue holding them together. 

Last time he had, that body hadn’t been all dressed and all male with more muscle than him and that same stink of underarms and crotch. He blinked at the strained-piss-yellow sunlight slanting through the slats that caught across the back of Jim’s black coat and made it dingy brown instead. Leonard’s head was pulsing in time with his stomach curling but it wasn’t enough to move yet. For now it was the numbness of his left side stuck under him, the odd pull of his thigh across Jim’s and the hand that was—almost like accident—cupped across his hip.

Jim moved before he did, head tipping back, looking golden in piss-yellow light that caught his eyelashes and that was one too many observations about the man that was so close he could taste his rancid breath. “You make one hell of a drunk, Bones,” Jim said. When he said it, his mouth quirked on the corner like it was _fantastic_ but there was no sense of humor bleeding through his voice.

“It was the smoke,” he bothered to say and like he needed to offer more to that he threw out: “I used to smoke something like that after my Dad died.” Back when he was _turning gray_ and nothing mattered but talking to bugs in trees because his whole life was _fucking_ over. (Back when thinking _fuck_ was the worst thing he’d ever done.)

“You don’t look like the type.” Then they were pulling apart, Jim was groaning as he squeeze-release-pumped his fist to get the blood back into his fingertips. Then they were one sitting up on the edge of the bed and one flat on his back and full of nothing worth saying to the other.

Leonard squinted at the light and his hangover. “Neither do you,” he said.

Jim’s chin went down against his chest and he did (look like the type) _then_ , looked like a boy that got beat. “Yeah,” Jim said like it didn’t matter much, “except you have a choice.”

“Did the bastard that did it smoke?” Leonard asked when it wasn’t _his fucking business_ but if Jim was going to preach at him about his _habits_ well, he was mean as a snake and cruel enough to ask.

Jim looked _that way_ and not at him like he was judging if he wanted to bother, like he hadn’t ever been asked about—like maybe everyone that knew about it had _known about it_ and done nothing at all. Leonard sat up then, halfway to reaching out and stopped and said:

“I’m sorry, you don’t have to—”

“No,” Jim said, “he was dead sober.” Then he looked back and he was all _animal_ behind his blue eyes where in mattered. “I’ve got to go.”

Yeah. But Leonard caught his jacket first and held him there while he held his own damn breath that he wasn’t going to get hit for the audacity. “Thanks Jim,” he said.

Maybe nobody had ever said it before because Jim looked like he’d been slapped and Leonard felt like he was going to puke.

 

 ** _side b: take your stand and sing your protest_**  
It was another day in another class and everyone was giving _presentations_ about their great Starfleet heroes. In a crowd of redshirted cadets there wasn’t a brain original enough to think outside of the confines of the Academy and find a hero that hadn’t worn the Starfleet emblem. The first two days Kirk had been disgusted and the last two he’d been bored because it was rote recitation of history books that were probably easier to read than to be understood in regurgitated bits and chunks. 

He was slouching in his seat, balancing the stylus on its point against the desk, day-dreaming about Uhura because she was in the xenolinguistic club like a _good girl_ ought to have been and he had attended a meeting _or two_ since he decided it was his fucking skin and his fucking life. (Because demerits looked bad but clubs looked good and maybe he just wasn’t ready to get kicked out yet.) He was half-through a filthy thought about her hair when there was the tap-tap-rapping of the professor saying:

 _I see you, Mr. Kirk_

like it made a difference to him.

There was a girl with a red flush under her dead-pale face and the teacher was glancing at her like saying _you idiot_ without saying it right out loud. Half the class was glancing at him and he didn’t think he looked that fucking interesting until he saw the flickering projection behind the bone-pale girl just _staring_ at him. The name all in serviceable **block** letters read:

**Winona Kirk**

.

\--

So the story of his mother’s life was puked right out there in front of a crowd of gawking cadets that were stealing glances at his face to see any little _crack_ in his unerring calm. They were _uncomfortable_ caught between his seat in the back on the right and the screen projection of some woman’s name that looked a lot like his. Like they had a _reason_ , like he was a _side show_ or a _freak_ on display because his eyes were blue like hers and his hair was that _same shade_ of blonde. (Except, his was _real_ and hers was _fake_.) If he let that attentive, peaceful, _calm_ stare drop for a second they would have been in chaos falling one-over-the-other to save his soul and poke his hide and dissect him just for extra fucking credit.

Sarah Michelle Verbect was in the front of the class reciting facts she learned from books and articles and news broadcasts like she had _any_ fucking idea.

Winona Kirk was born in deep space to Beth and Captain James Hepford. She spent the first few years of her life on space stations and space ships before she was relocated to San Francisco. It wasn’t long in Sunny San-Fran before the idyllic marriage of an unhappy housewife and her hard-assed regulation-humping Starfleet Captain husband fell to shambles. (Grandpa James, well he was dead a long time now but there was talk around the Kirk house about what a temper that man did have.) Little Winnie went with Mommy and she spent all her pretty-adolescent years in bleak-flat-Iowa.

Sarah Michelle told the story like it was anything she read out of a book, long stories about cheerleading and good grades, about winning science fairs and exhibiting mechanical genius. She told it like it was a picture show and in this fairy tale, George met Winona at school and sure, he saved her life, but it was a motorcycle accident (but Uncle Sam he told that story once and it was an _overdose_ and the only motorcycle involved was the one George stole). 

Winona moved back to sunny fucking San Fran and finished school _with honors_ before applying to Starfleet Academy (following the tragic death of her father) and well, once she was there it was accomplishment after accomplishment after _accomplishment_ until George found her and then it was _more accomplishments_ and _honors_ and a baby and a career and then—

Everyone stared at him because he was a baby born in the medical shuttle while his father said (I love—) but not (you) because he was face-first into death and good-bye-honey. The silence dragged as he lifted an eyebrow to ask them what they wanted from him. 

Sarah Michelle cleared her throat and charged on with the vague strokes of a life overcoming grief, of triumph and the strength of a woman that lived on past the death of her husband to earn a distinguished and respectable career in Starfleet’s service. That Winona Kirk, she was the humanitarian sort, always willing to help out starving little kids on other planets (because well, she left hers with a man she fucked once like it was _so much better_ than the alternative).

When Sarah Michelle was all finished she held her chin up and she didn’t say (I’m sorry) but the only clapping was the sort that was obligatory and nobody wanted to offer a comment or a word of praise.

\--

Kirk figured he could have just asked Sarah Michelle for a copy of her fabulous report because well—it was _his_ mother and she was kind of a bitch for writing it in the first place (not that he was judging her or anything) but he spent sixteen learning how to _program_. It wasn’t much of a leap from _programming_ to _hacking_ so he stole himself a copy and he attached it to a message and he sent it to his mother.

Winona might want to know the fairy tale history of her life. 

\--

Half or maybe (three-quarters) of him wanted to get drunk because there was that pleasant sort of buzz that itched under his skin when he drank until he couldn’t drink any more. The world was all right and fuzzy around the edges and he forgot about things like (dead fathers) and (don’t give up) and then again there was always (reality) waiting for him when he came back. So he stood at the steps of the dorm for a minute and tried to figure out which way he was going to go.

He thought of the old sawbones on the floor with the maniac’s giggles because he _couldn’t stop_ and his life was so pitiable and such a _wreck_ that it was drink-guzzle-smoke until reality was a shadow and shadows were jokes and he’d run his cold fingers across Kirk’s skin like the secrets of the world were written in Braille across his ribs. That wasn’t so bad but it was the thought of the man’s hands in his hair and the taste of his smoke-stinking breath across Kirk’s lips when he said (just stay). He mumbled all his secrets with his eyes closed and his arms tight around Kirk until there was no space between them.

So he ran because there was nobody to whisper things to when he ran because there was nobody but his own body and his own thoughts trailing along behind him.

\--

So school was ending (for the summer) and he got this message in his inbox that said it was from G. Samuel Kirk (science officer) and after a few days when Kirk finally opened it he found:

_Jim,_  
Going home for a few weeks. Grandpa Tiberius said he’d love to see you. I can come pick you up if you want to go.  
Sam 

It left him with stupid questions about why they called him (Grandpa Tiberius) if they only ever had one grandfather to start with and why the fuck Sam thought Iowa was anyone’s home except his and some other people that had Kirk’s name. He was half to erasing it without an answer—finger across the screen to the button and just about _touching_ when he stopped and all he saw was the stretch of a half-empty dorm room for the whole of the summer.

He thought _Grandpa Tiberius said he’d love to see you_ and some stupid part of him wanted to believe that enough that he hit reply instead of erase and forget formalities he said:

 _Sure_.

Like _why not_?

\--

Sam was dating a _nice girl_ by the name of Aurelan that Grandma Laura was going to love on sight if she didn’t love already just on _principle_. Aurelan was that sort of girl that wore skirts and baked cookies and would sit and talk about knitting and town gossip until she was pink in the cheeks and winded. When she had babies (because that was only inevitable with the way Sam looked at her like a lovesick romance novel) they were going to be fat-cheeked-mama’s boys that never-ever screamed in hallways or backed up toilets. 

Kirk liked her because she smiled at him and said (it’s so nice to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you) like she really _meant it_. Only there was no way precisely she could have heard shit about him because Sam didn’t hear shit about him. Two brothers knew that—looking back and forth at one another over her sincere smile—but she didn’t know that. Kirk smiled back at her and said (I see why Sam likes you) because she was sweet, soft and dumb as a brick.

Grandma Laura was going to _love_ her.

\--

Grandpa Tiberius was combing his horses when they pulled up to the house and Grandma Laura was waving from the porch with her handkerchief in the wind. Her long gray hair was twisted back in a knot over the nape of her neck (just like he remembered) and she was coming down the steps like this was the homecoming of the century. Sam was getting out of the car and Aurelan was smoothing down her skirt and adjusting her hair around her ears just so she could be _super_ pretty.

Kirk pushed open his door and climbed out and stood in the back where nobody was expected to give him a hug like he was _missed so much_ and Grandma Laura did her part and wrapped her arms around some woman she hadn’t even met yet before she even took in the sight of him. But that was Grandma Laura and he was Winona Kirk’s son. Kirk turned back to get his bag and ran into Grandpa Tiberius who caught him in two great-big arms like a bear and crushed him like he was a kid that needed to be squeezed until he couldn’t breathe.

“Hi,” Kirk wheezed and was squeezed all the harder. “I’m not staying.”

Grandpa Tiberius pulled back, arms on his shoulders and tears in his eyes when he looked at him. “Oh,” he said, “I know. I know,” and his hands were so damn _big_ —always had been—and they were age-rough and weathered against Kirk’s cheek in that way that came from years and years and years of working dirt to make a living. 

There was nobody in the yard but them and Kirk wanted to say _I hate you because you left me_ but he couldn’t because Grandpa Tiberius was a great-bear of an old man who was _disappointed_ but never angry and he’d fixed broken toilets and he never _ever_ spanked little boys. Kirk looked at his feet and then back at the house and Grandpa Tiberius was patting his shoulder like guiding a skittish horse along. 

He didn’t say (I’m sorry about my bitch of a wife) right out loud but there was an old man’s sigh in his throat and a squeeze of his hand that seemed to want to anyway.

\--

Grandma Laura hugged him like a brittle stick and shooed him up the stairs to his room—he knew where it was—like he was a frequent houseguest and not some tag-a-long that didn’t belong there. He climbed steps that seemed small like a dollhouse after all these years and watched moving pictures in electronic frames that started with George-as-a-baby and ended with George-as-a-man. When he reached the top he stared at the doors and thought that his room was on the end where the light was coming through and Sam was talking sweet about his childhood to his sweetheart.

Then there was the door right there with the rocket ship stickers all but faded against the old paint and that door belonged to _George Kirk_ , his father and no little boys were much _wanted_ in there. Grandma Laura was telling Grandpa Tiberius what a darling Aurelan was and Kirk half wanted to drop a softball in her toilet like a great big _fuck you too_ because she hadn’t ever been what he wanted either. He crossed the little hallway with his backpack against his shoulder and pushed open his father’s door.

It ghosted a breath of dust like the last cough of a corpse and he stepped inside where everything smelled like age and crinkling dried out paper. It was clean and exact—the perfect picture of how it looked the last time George walked out of it right down to the regulation corners on the bed. Kirk dropped his bag and crossed to the bed, to the red blanket across the rocket ship bedsheets and dropped down to sit on the old-old squeaking mattress.

He leaned back against fluffed pillows and thought Grandma Laura kept this shrine to her son with the precision of a priest in a church. He left his feet off the bed because he had _some respect_ and put his arms behind his head. There were models of old starships floating on the ceiling with what few stars were still stuck. Across the room, on the windowsills there were stacks of sticky-stars that must have been meant to glow in the dark. On the walls there were star charts and life plans and posters of Starfleet’s glorious future.

(Hi Dad), he thought like a little boy at a grave because his daddy was buried in space with the ashes of a broken ship. (I’m going to be alright.)

There were footsteps on the stairs that were only inevitable but there was the sound of a sudden stop like brakes pulled too hard and Grandpa Tiberius was saying: “You leave that boy alone, Laura.”

“He doesn’t belong in George’s room,” Laura was hissing back.

Kirk’s ears were burning but Grandpa Tiberius said: “ _Leave that boy alone_ , he’s got all the right in the world.”

“George was my son,” Laura said.

“And Jimmy was George’s and that means Jimmy’s got more right to his father than you now come off them stairs and finish dinner.”

Kirk smiled at the ceiling like a victory he didn’t earn (and it felt cheap) and he pushed off his boots just so he could lay across the bed and wrap himself around what it must have been like. How it must have felt to grow up here, wrapped in warm sunshine and summer breezes and drafts in the winter just daydream and night-dreaming about solar systems far away. 

\--

 _Hey_ , Sam whispered long after dinner was over and Kirk hadn’t joined. His voice was a steely whisper across the floor from the barely-open door.

Kirk looked at him and Sam took that to mean that he could come right on in so he did. He climbed onto the bed next to him, all in his pajamas with his gray-thermal socks and put his arms behind his head to look at the last few stars clinging to the ceiling. 

“I know you hate us, Jim,” Sam said, “I know it’s our fault.”

Kirk thought—better late than never—but he looked over at his brother and he couldn’t bring himself to hate him now. Not here, not where their father slept night-after-night with his peaceful dreams about beautiful things. The way Kirk figured it, George was the sort of man that he couldn’t ever be (and didn’t want to be) but Sam could be their father if he could settle his conscience and put his regrets to rest. This world, it needed men like George that loved their wives and their kids and gave their lives because there were eight-hundred-more that needed to live.

Pike said: _it depends on your definition of winning_ but Kirk didn’t much figure that George Kirk was concerned with winning or losing because he was too busy being the tortoise in a footrace. Slow, steady, methodical and sturdy. 

“I don’t hate you Sam,” Kirk said and he meant it. 

“Why didn’t you—why did you stay with Frank?” Sam asked.

Kirk looked at the stars and the grease spots from where the others had fallen. “When you were at dinner, did Grandma Laura ask about me even once?”

His answer was his brother’s silence. And Kirk’s answer was the reality that there were worse things to a little boy than _whippings_. But that was yesterday and he’d put that behind him with a dermal regenerator and some fancy new cream that the old sawbones had fixed up all on his own. 

“What track are you on?” Sam asked after a pause.

“Command,” Kirk said, “I’m going to be a Captain.” 

But he wasn’t going to be _George_.

\--

The next morning with his fingers smelling like permanent glue that he’d used to stick stars back to his father’s ceiling, he stood at the door with his bag in his hands and watched Grandma Laura biting her tongue to keep in her words about how he was _just like his mother_ in every way that mattered.

Grandpa Tiberius was looking old and worn and too tired to deal with that woman today. So Kirk said: “It was nice to see you,” like he half meant the words.

“Jim, stay,” Sam sighed. 

“No,” he said back. That was his decision to stay or leave, like it was his decision to take one-two old books off his father’s shelf and rifle through his drawers of his old-old-ancient desk. He found shriveled wrappers and little love notes from some woman that wasn’t his mother and a book of poetry that was all paper-pages and smelled like age. 

“Then let us buy you a ticket back out to San Francisco.”

“I’ll manage it,” Kirk said.

Grandma Laura was turning her head toward the kitchen and keeping her mouth shut. Kirk stared at her and he couldn’t stop the venom in his mouth that fell right through his lips and even if it was _petty_ and _awful_ he found himself saying:

“It’s alright, Grandma Laura, I don’t want to look at you either.”

When she looked back at him there were tears on her eyelashes like she had _one damn good reason_ to be hurt by _him_. Grandpa Tiberius didn’t scold him and Sam didn’t defend her.

“My son died for you,” she said to him, “what have you done to earn that?”

\--

“Jim!” Sam was shouting after him all boots-over-dirt and out-of-breath. 

Kirk didn’t recognize the thump of his feet against the road as _running_ until he looked up to see the wind whipping his cheeks and thought _he’d walked out_ of that room and down the porch and past the car so why was he running now. His body was used to it—to running, to throwing itself into this so his mind would follow and fuck that thought it was about the motion of legs and arms and expansion of his lungs pulling in precious breath. 

Then Sam was grabbing him and Kirk didn’t _think_ he turned and _swung_ and caught Sam against the cheekbone—and watched him almost fall but his bag was in the dirt and his hands were on Sam. He was _hitting_ him twice before there was blood on the ground. Before his heart was screaming _fury_ like a fourteen year old boy who _didn’t belong there_ and there was snot in his nose again. Sam was coughing, lip dripping blood and spit and face bright-red like shame that he _should_ feel.

“Go back!” Kirk shouted at him, his finger pointing. “Go back, God-damn _you_.” He shoved Sam as hard as he could. For a fight in the bedroom where one said the other was _just like Mom_ and broke something that couldn’t ever be fixed. For a boy that walked out and said _stay if you want_ and not _you have to come_. 

“Jim,” Sam said, “Jim.”

Kirk kept shoving until Sam was on his ass in the dirt. He said it now like he hadn’t said it before: “I made it this far _on my own_. I don’t _need_ you. Go back, Sam.” Then he was turning and grabbing his bag, over his shoulder and it was one-foot-then-another before he was running.

\--

It was _nowhere, nowhere_ precisely. He was flat on his back, head on his bag, communicator growing cold in his hand while the bottle of liquor was warm in the other. He was blinking at stars, thinking about how far he was from San Francisco, just wanting to hear someone saying anything—(maybe he was drunk)—and all the names circling-circling-circling his head didn’t give a shit or weren’t going to listen. 

No, he had bruises on his knuckles and a fuck lot of nothing in his pockets. He looked at the communicator and flipped it open. When the operator on the line asked him who he wanted to talk to he mumbled: (Doctor Leonard H. McCoy in San Francisco).

The communicator buzzed and beeped and he held it against his gut while he took another drink (or two) and thought that if the old sawbones didn’t answer that Kirk would think that was _only sane_ because it was fuck-who-knows what time over on the coast. But the static crinkled up into the dark-cold-midnight air and the man’s always-fucking-pissed voice said:

 _What_? and _are you dying_? like he was going to be disappointed if he weren’t.

“No,” Kirk said, “don’t think so.”

It took a moment, like a pause and he thought the old sawbones was probably on his gut under his bed glaring at the damn communicator while he shook himself awake—except it sounded like footsteps and a closed door and then: “Jim?”

“I got a question, Bones—you’ve got to answer me honestly because I know if you lie.” He took another drink as he rolled onto his side and the communicator was close enough to kiss. “Every time you look at me you see—”

“Someone drowning,” McCoy said in that short-clipped way he did when he was tired of this already and why were they bothering.

Kirk nodded. “Ok.”

“You’re drunk,” came next.

“On fire whiskey,” Kirk agreed, “you’d like it, Bones. I’ll bring you some back, alright? We’ll drink it together.”

“You better bring two bottles then,” Bones said like it was a _date_.

“Yeah,” Kirk agreed, “you’re a drunk, I forgot.” He thought he was going to get cursed at but he heard Bones laughing on the other end like he was in a tiny bathroom with his hand going through his hair and he breathed a (yeah) right back at him like it was only the truth. 

Neither of them hung up and neither of them talked so it was the sound of breath across a speaker until Kirk was just drunker and he said: “it was my stepfather.” 

Then Bones didn’t say much of anything for a long time but when he said something he said something (perfect), he said: "Ok."

Kirk laughed until he was hiccupping and Bones was laughing with him even if it wasn't fucking funny at all. When he was wheezing, on his side, he was kissing the communicator again. "You're a fucking bad psychiatrist, Bones—remind me never to let you on my ship."

"What ship," Bones said back.

"My ship. I'm going to be the Captain of a starship."

"The U.S.S. Puddleduck."

"Yeah," Kirk agreed. That was going to be it—the U.S.S. Puddleduck. 

"Where are you?" Bones asked him like it was only an afterthought. Like it didn't matter at all but if Kirk wanted to tell him that was alright too.

"You going to come get me if I tell you?"

"Sure, on a white horse."

Kirk giggled again and eyed the whiskey because he didn't remember being _this_ drunk before but there it was now. He swallowed another mouthful and one more—rolling back onto his back to eye the stars. "Come on a motorcycle," he said. Then he mumbled some coordinates that sounded just about right last time he'd looked at his map and flipped the communicator shut.

\--

He wasn’t hungover because he was still fucking _drunk_ the next morning—or afternoon—when he was kicked in the ass and rolled onto his side. He tried to get to his feet, or attack or do anything but roll in the dirt but all he managed was grabbing an ankle in his fist and glaring up into the sunlight glinting off the top of a really-tall-guy’s head.

So it was a squint and a squeeze and Kirk was half on his elbows before he realized he was glaring up at Bones fucking McCoy in the _flesh_ who should be out there on that west coast growling at nurses. “Anyone ever tell you that your mother’s really fucking charming?” Bones demanded.

“How’d you get here?” he asked.

“Shuttle,” Bones said.

Kirk thought that was damn strange all things considered and he might have said something about it but he was rolling on his side puking up fire whiskey that made his throat _burn_.

\--

When he was more presentable for public purposes, Bones dragged him over to a car that had that _just rented_ look to it and opened the passenger side to motion Kirk inside because he damn sure wasn’t driving when his breath was enough to get a sober man stupid drunk. “Where are we going?”

“Back to the shuttle,” Bones said.

No. Back to the shuttle was straight back to San Francisco and that just wasn’t going to happen right now. He put one leg across the console in the middle and lifted his ass up and over, flopped into the driver’s seat and smirked up at Bones’ scowl when he tried to open the door and found it locked. “I’m the Captain,” he said through the window.

“You’re drunk.”

“I can drive,” he said with his hand flopping when he meant to have it waving. “Get aboard or I’ll leave you.”

Smart men were the ones that looked you in the eyes and knew that it was true and you _meant it_ so Bones might just have been the first _really_ smart man that he ever met. He mumbled shit under his breath as he went around and crawled in the passenger side, leaning back to grab his medical kit that always hung at his hip. “Lean over here,” he said.

Kirk leaned toward him and Bones was sniffing his breath before his eyebrow went up and his nose twitched like a rabbit. “It tasted better going in,” he said. Then it was his thumb against the start and fixing that radio station and they were zero to sixty and _gone_ baby, _gone_.

\--

At twenty miles Bones leaned across the console with the hypospray in hand and jabbed him hard in the neck. He steadied the wheel and kept them from running right off the fucking road as the shot of pain went up and down Kirk’s spine and his head swam in funny eddies before it evened out again and he was stone-cold-fucking-sober.

“How’d you do that?” he demanded.

Bones looked _smug_ and it was the first time he looked anything but pissed or pathetic. “I’m a _doctor_.”

\--

It was a diner along the road when Kirk stopped the car again. Bones was staring out the wide-open window with his eyebrow up and a curious stare across the way at him. “The shuttle was the _other_ way.” Like the man had any particular love for flying to start out with. Maybe he was just in love with the monotony of his life spinning circles in the mud—wake up angry, work angry, drink angry, sleep miserable. 

“You said something about my Mother.”

Bones nodded—looking away and then back—he drew a sigh and dropped it. “She called the Academy and demanded to know where you were and they found me because I’m your doctor and said if I heard from you—so you called and I called them and your mother called me and somehow I ended up on a shuttle.” 

The thing about Bones was that if he wanted to ask (what happened) it didn’t show on his face or in his voice because he couldn’t give a damn about how they ended up here right now. It was his belly gurgling that nagged him and the fact that they were here and their ride was there. Kirk leaned forward against the steering wheel and thought about it for a minute like weighing his options. “Is Winona paying for the car?”

“Yeah,” Bones answered. Then he seized upon the realization that he shouldn’t have said that but the man was one of those terrible-terrible liars so it wouldn’t have mattered what he said. He was one protest after-the-other all through breakfast and talking loud about getting to the driver’s seat first but he wasn’t half as fast or a third as strong.

\--

“This,” Bones said back on day one when he thought that someone was going to care that he was offering protest. That man had all the earmarks of being raised in one of those fine upstanding Southern households where you washed your hands and behind your ears and you didn’t put your elbows on the table. “Is stealing, you know.”

“It’s borrowing,” Kirk countered because it was. His mother was footing the bill and she wanted him back in _San Francisco_ so that was where he was going. If he knew her (and he did) she was straightening everything out with the rental agency right this second because every car had a GPS and there wasn’t anywhere he was going to go she couldn’t find him. “It’s a rental and we’re _borrowing_ it.”

“It’s someone else renting it and its _stealing_.”

Kirk rolled his eyes. “I used to steal cars, I know what stealing is and this _is not_ stealing.”

“That’s your argument, you’re a thief so you’re not stealing?”

“You can’t beat that one, Bones.” He looked over at the man staring straight out the window watching the flat plains of nothing going past. There was a fat lot of nothing to look at here but there was more of flat lands and nothing spectacular to go before they reached their destination. 

“It’s stealing,” Bones said after Kirk was sure he’d given up.

\--

So there was a lake with some trees and Kirk smelled like dirt and ass and puked-fire-whiskey anyway. So he parked them somewhere in the shade and popped the hood and pulled a plug or two that left Bones frowning at him.

“Stealing and destruction of property,” he said on day two.

“I can fix it,” Kirk assured him. Then it was shirt-over-his-head and pants-down-his-legs leaving him with shorts that needed washing anyway. There were sunbathing beauties on the shore that stared at his ass and his crotch in the way that they did. He smiled at them with a wink and asked how the water was.

“Fine,” they said with knowing winks.

Bones sat on his ass on the dirt and frowned half the day until he was coated in sweat and the beach was a crowded affair with families and someone offered them a few spare sets of trunks because there were kids-it-wasn’t-appropriate-but-they-understood-some-boys-were-poor boys.

Kirk found out, late in the evening, that Bones could swim like the God-damn Loch Ness monster and didn’t care much about drowning people because he-was-a-doctor and he could resuscitate you after. (At least, that was what he said when Kirk shoved him and kicked him under the water. With a grin and a wink and something looked dangerously close to _humor_ on his face.)

“Murder,” Kirk shot back after the plugs were all fixed and no damage was done to the car, “is illegal.”

“So is kidnapping,” Bones offered.

\--

On day four, when the money was slim and Kirk had no intention of calling his mother for more they got _creative_ about what they ate. There was a fruit stand next to the road and Bones did some fancy thing with his southern drawl and trash-talking the nice lady’s nice fruit until she was hissing mad at everyone born in the south and cursing his mother, daring him to take a taste and say it wasn’t as good as any Georgia-grown peach.

So Bones took one for himself and one for Kirk and chewed on it thoughtfully and said it wasn’t near as good so she threatened him and he apologized while Kirk leaned back against the car and ate his apple in salute to the fine art of swindling.

“I don’t think that was exactly moral either,” he said when they were in the car with a free jar of preserves and a sack of homemade bread.

“It’s starving man’s moral,” Bones said.

Kirk snorted. “When have you ever been starving?”

\--

On day ten when Bones discovered they were going down instead of across they ended up stalled at the side of the road because Kirk wasn’t quite heartless enough to let the man really walk away from him down the highway in the middle of fucking nowhere never mind how stupid he was.

“We have to go back!” Bones shouted at him. “I have a job! I have a life! I have—”

A beard was what he had. They needed a bed and a shave and some shampoo before any conversation they were going to have would make sense. Kirk put his hands on his hips and tipped his head to one side. Bones was meters down the road glaring back at him all squinty-eyed. “Fuck your job,” Kirk shouted back.

“Fuck my job?” Bones said.

“Fuck your life,” Kirk added. “If it mattered that fucking much you would have hypo’ed me in my sleep and taken the car. You’re just _scared_.”

“Of you!” was a point at him from too great a distance to hurt his damn feelings. The only implication was that he was crazy and maybe he was—maybe it was weeks before school started again and he had no fucking intention of spending all his time in a room looking at the ceiling dreaming about the life he didn’t have. 

Fuck where he came from because he was going wherever he wanted now.

“Pussy!” Kirk shouted.

For such a bitchy guy, Bones could hit if he wanted to. All bones in his knuckles and no finesse but he launched himself into the punch and they went tumbling to the ground. Kirk wrestled because it wasn’t a _fair fight_ and Bones was knees and elbows and smacking his face-neck-shoulders until he was on his stomach, arm behind his back and Kirk was laying across him breathing against the back of his ear.

“Let me up,” Bones said.

“You know how to play poker?” Kirk asked.

\--

They won at the first bar on day eleven and the second bar on day twelve but the fourth bar on day fifteen their luck ran all out and some man with more biceps than brains was in Kirk’s face, chin to his forehead glaring down his long-alien nose saying: “Cheater.”

Kirk said: “sore loser,” with a quip of a laugh and considered the conversation all _finished_ and done except that the nice man with the long nose didn’t agree. Bones was grabbing the money and shoving it into his dirty pockets while the man with the misunderstanding threw Kirk across the table-next-to-theirs.

It just didn’t get any better after that.

\--

“Not those,” Kirk said when Bones tried on the next pair of sunglasses to hide the black eyes he’d gotten from his very first bar fight. He leaned against the counter twirling his own pair of glasses between forefinger and thumb while Bones tried on the next pair. The lady behind the counter made a face all lips screwed up to the left and shook her head _no, no, no_. So it was another and another until finally Bones found a pair that fit his face just right.

“I get off at five,” the pretty girl said.

“Do you?” Kirk offered back. He was only a man and she was only a girl with a grin that promised _things_ he just wasn’t likely to get from Bones. 

“How old are you?” Bones asked like he was someone’s father as he laid their credits across the counter. The pretty girl bit her lip and said _seventeen_ like she didn’t want to admit it _at all_ which left Bones giving him a glare. “Statutory rape is illegal too.”

“Only if someone tells,” Kirk said because he seemed to remember lots and lots of nice experienced women that loved little boys with big dicks and never seemed to have a problem with their morals. “Starving man’s morals,” he said.

“Your dick isn’t starving,” Bones said and then apologized to the blushing girl. 

\--

“What is it with you?” Kirk asked on day one-or-the-fuck-other when he was half through a glass bottle of something clear and sweet-singing-little-birdies. He was sprawled back against the car, trying to crane his head to see where Bones was sitting on the hood, back against the windshield watching the sky. It was middle of the afternoon and nobody _moral_ or _ethical_ should be drunk at this hour.

“Your inferior booze is making you stupid,” came drifting back toward him.

Kirk giggled as well as he was able with his chin against his chest and his neck all at funny angles. Then he was rolling sideways, one hand on the window of the car and staggering to his feet. Leaning toward the hood, toward Bones, one finger pointing. “You don’t have sex, you don’t have fun, you don’t fight, you just—bitch.”

Bones needed poetry composed to his fucking right eyebrow because it did all the talking for him. Calling him _nothing but an idiot_ while he reached over to pluck the bottle out of his hand.

“Taking another man’s booze is immoral and unethical and _wrong_ ,” Kirk said as his grip slipped and his lost his bottle. His words were like fishes and he was swimming right along with them. Something funny about that clear-silvery-moonshine in a bottle. 

“I remember that class,” Bones said, “right after generalized non-interference and right before _do you stop a murder_.”

“Fuck yes,” Kirk said.

“That’s not non-interference,” Bones said and he was so close Kirk could bite him for being a dick. Except his eyes didn’t match his words and he was all-sad again for no reason at all. So Kirk didn’t have to threaten him with his teeth. “I wouldn’t watch them kill someone either. But that’s a no-win scenario.”

Kirk snorted. “No such thing.”

Bones laughed before he tipped Kirk’s bottle up and took a swallow that left his lips wet and he pointed a finger right at him. “Your whole life has been a fucking _no-win scenario_ and you don’t believe in them?”

“No,” Kirk agreed.

\--

When he woke up, he was in the tiny-little backseat with a headache like he’d been kicked in the skull. Bones was driving steady and sure like a tortoise. “Where’s your miracle cure, you fucking immoral bitch?” Kirk asked.

Bones just chuckled and pulled a hypospray up out of the cup-holder and handed it back with directions about put it there and press it here. Kirk groaned as it worked through his bloodstream. The world became clear again and smelled like corn and straw and _grain_. It was a nice smell with sunshine through the windows. 

“I got you breakfast, you ungrateful little shit.”

“Yeah,” Kirk asked as he crawled through the seats and fell into place in the passenger seat. It was sausage and chicken biscuits and a tall glass of orange juice that was almost room temperature but worth drinking anyway. “You’re still a pussy,” he said around a mouthful.

Later: “Where are we going?”

Bones lifted his shoulders and dropped them again. “I went right at the fork in the road.”

\--

It was around a fire with a bottle of booze between them when Kirk found himself talking about his father—about how he died, about how he never met him and his voice didn’t crack but the smoke in his eyes left them wet. 

So Bones told him a story about how his mother died and how it killed his father a few years later. The man shrugged like it wasn’t nothing comparable at all—maybe it wasn’t because Winona refused to die just because she had no reason to live. Jim didn’t talk about her because she was off limits and Bones knew that without having to be told.

Instead they argued about beer until they argued about women and Bones was all about legs and fingers and voices while Kirk like ass and tits like any good caveman and from there it was comparing numbers when there was no comparison. Bones had gotten laid by three different women in twenty nine years.

“You?” Bones said when he was tired of being laughed at.

“Oh hell, I don’t fucking know,” he said wiping tears out of his eyes. “Men, women—it’s been too long and too many to count.” Then he hiccupped a laugh and shrugged, hands slapping his thighs. “None for a while—” 

\--

It was one of the last days, when they were past the California border and so close to the Academy the scent of shoe polish was in the wind. Bones was getting drunk this time instead of slow-playing him just to get his chance to drive them _nowhere_ and Kirk was drunk enough that his fingers and body were loose and tight and _far past_ ready.

The motion was mutual because Bones was laughing at something stupid about the difference between assault and brawling. It was all stupid because when they were drunk they were all stupid and no smarts at all. Bones rolled onto his side and with half-mast eyes and warm-whiskey-breath that wasn’t quite shocked to find itself rubbing right against Kirk.

Kirk had a hand on Bones’ waist for no good reason at all until he had fingers under the shirt. The skin was all warm and smooth. “Where’d you get that stupid tattoo?” Kirk asked because he’d seen it days ago and hadn’t gotten to asking about it. Now with his hand pushing under the waist band of Bones’ loose pants he thought he could trace the black lines.

“Don’t know, I was black-out drunk at the time.” His body shifted like he wanted it and he must have because it was his hand on Kirk’s face bringing them mouth-to-mouth. His tongue was whiskey-warm and his hand slid down Kirk’s arm like it was _in love_ or something like that.

It was slow like that, nothing but the touch of mouths and tongues and the gentle brush of Kirk’s fingertip across imagined lines. 

Until, maybe, it was push—and then pull and then Kirk was over Bones and the man was arching up against him, hands in his clothes to pull him down, finding his sides and his back and moaning into his mouth like he _wanted_ this. The drunk spiral of thoughts all ended with dicks and Kirk pressed them together because it was just _inevitable_.

Bones kicked and jerked and pulled away, eyes wide and coughing his shock. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

Kirk dropped his face against the dirt and shook his head. “Shit,” he mumbled and then rolled onto his back. “Sometimes I hate you, Bones. Blue balls are immoral too.”

Bones was on his feet and stumbling toward the car saying: “I said I was sorry, ass—I’m sleeping in the car.”

\--

So it was over and there they were, in thread-bare dirty clothes with sunglasses like souvenirs and a car full of odds-and-ends and memories of the places they went. Bones was facing some sort of shit at his job unless Winona was nice enough to lay that flat too. Kirk had to figure out where he was living this year and he had a few ideas about that and wondered how secure the room assignments database was.

He looked at Bones who looked at him. “Drinks on Thursday.”

“I probably work,” was the answer.

“So?”

Bones rolled his eyes. “Drinks on Thursday.”

\--

Kirk made it to his room and found his stuff still waiting for him. He tapped the screen on the desk and waited for the computer to boot up and say its greetings. It was a matter of tap-tap-tap and a little fancy finger work but he had the room assignments database under his command and it was a tap-drag until it rearranged itself just for him.

When he closed it out he saw the blinking red dot on his messages and opened it. It said Winona Kirk (engineering) and it had a document attached to it. He thought it must be a lecture about being irresponsible but it was:

_Jimmy,  
Laura has always been a bitch and she can go fuck herself. You’re George’s son and he’d be damn proud of you. He’d be _ashamed of her_ not of you. _

_That essay you sent was a pretty fairytale. It’s nothing like the truth. Nobody wanted the truth because George had just died and your Grandfather asked me to think about your father’s good name. So here’s the truth if you need it._

_Don’t give up.  
Winona_

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "the truth" aka the story that Winona sends Jim is the story [Orbit](http://archiveofourown.org/works/584414).


	5. cut your teeth, cut your mouth/secret in the back of my skull

05.  
 ** _side a: cut your teeth, cut your mouth_**  
When Jim said _drinks on Thursday_ Bones had assumed two important things about the statement—in no particular order of significance—

One: any drink that Jim had on Thursday was going to be up to his eyeballs in alcohol content until his chest was just short of bursting from those _cute_ idiot giggles of his. And they were doing nothing with themselves but comparing tits and beers and haircuts before it all dissolved into this-grass-is-really-itchy.

Two: Thursday would be the soonest he saw Jim and it’d be one of those things that people did where they thanked you for running off for a summer and living in filth because you were sleeping on the ground and learning a thing or two about being nowhere and finding yourself out along the weeds or across rough-ground as you ran from bears and snakes and snapping turtles.

It was just, as it turned out, Leonard couldn’t predict any damn thing that Jim was going to do any better than he could remember when he started thinking of himself as _Bones_.

\--

_Welcome back Dr. McCoy_ , said the receptionist with a look like she was disappointed to see his face. Her stare swept along the sun burnt edges of his tan and took in the rough set of his clothes because they’d been in a pile on his bed for months and he wasn’t the sort that ironed shirts just to wrinkle them again. _Have a nice vacation?_ was asking him if he’d come back in a better mood because she damn sure didn’t miss his bitching.

“Yes,” Leonard answered. “I saw the world’s biggest ball of twine.”

And she didn’t know what to make of that but she knew when he was scheduled to work next and gave him a PADD full of notices and updates and important policy changes that he was going to need to memorize. He took them to his room, dropped them on his desk and fell asleep for the next twenty-four hours.

\--

So Jim showed up with his bag on his back and two boxes next to Leonard’s door. His palm was itching nervous against his jeans as he smiled broadly and tilted his head toward the boxes. “It’s Thursday,” he said.

“What’s that?” Bones (because he was always Bones around Jim) demanded.

“We’re roommates now,” Jim said. His eyes were shallow like he was trying to keep secrets and that only meant that this fortunate act of fate was nothing but an illegal act of tampering. This was a kid asking him not to complain or bitch and just to let him through the door. The summer was dragging its way right into his dorm room smelling like Academy issue shampoo and Bones rolled his eyes.

“Hacking into Academy files is _illegal_ , Jim.” Like it mattered when he was motioning to be handed one of the boxes and not expecting it to weigh half as much as it did. When he dropped it on the empty bed across the narrow space from his, dust plumed up into the air and Jim cocked an eyebrow at him. “Shut up,” he said. “What’s in there anyway?”

“Books,” Jim said.

“Books?”

“Books.” And they were, all old-old-old paper books bound with hard covers that were about anything from ice fishing to The Tale of Two Cities because Jim wasn’t too picky about what he was reading ever but he was a whore for paper-pages and smoky-old-ink smells. When the boxes were in place at the foot of his bed, Jim was sitting on his new mattress and reaching into his bag. He pulled out a jar of milk and a jug of orange juice and held them up. “Drinks,” he said.

\--

There was paper work and new class schedules to consider. The long list of credits he had to have were filled up to the eyeballs with things like _practical applications_ and _lab time_ when he was fairly certain that he’d taken all the biochemistry classes he was ever going to need to take. Then again he’d never seen a case of transporter sickness because he’d never been near enough to a transporter to care and all of a sudden space wasn’t an abstract but a black reality on his class schedule.

Jim was eating an apple like a cow, over on his bed, half-naked because the man didn’t like shirts like he should, staring at his own class list. “Huh,” he mumbled. “You ever been in space, Bones?”

“No, you?” he muttered without thinking. He was wrapping his brain around this notion of _transporter_ and _outer space_ because he was supposed to be taking a cruise in a training vessel and the last thing he wanted was to be in a tin can in space floating along.

“Oh never,” Jim said like dripping with sarcasm. His toes were spreading as he stretched one leg straight and pulled one knee up, leaning back against the headboard with all his stupid carelessness and a frowning grin on his face until Bones would figure out what stupid thing he said.

Jim was born in space. “That doesn’t count,” Bones said because _it didn’t_. 

\--

Leonard remembered _her_ in a tumble of thoughts and the chaotic churn of summer days and long fall nights but he didn’t remember exactly when the thought that she was kind-of-annoying and far-too-pushy bled into I-want-to-see-her-naked and when naked because I-want-to-love-her. Love was nothing but the soft-core version of sex and sex was nothing but a fool’s delusional belief that fucking was something besides animal need. So maybe, Leonard had always been a fool and maybe _she_ had liked that about him with her spring-flower-sun-dresses and her two braids and how she bit his jaw and wrapped her legs around him to keep him close.

He was a skinny boy and she was a slim girl and they fit together just fine and _perfect_ exactly how they were meant to. It was eternity in the simple motion of rock-forward, rock-back and the filthiest thought or thing he ever did was say he wanted a blow job when she asked him what he thought he should get for his birthday.

When he thought about it (not that he did) he figured that there was a line in there somewhere that he stepped across that said that he liked _women_ and it was one of those decisions that defined him. It was like briefs or boxers (or thongs but that wasn’t really an option) and if you were a briefs kind of man than you were a square and those kind of men that wore boxers were laughing like rib-clutching at you for _ever_. 

So he was twenty-nine years old and there was a line and an asterisk next to his name that meant he’d made a decision when he was a teenager that went the way of pretty women and breasts and it was over and done with. It wasn’t anything he was going to think about ever again and nothing that he struggled with because fuck knew there were more questions in his head than he had answers for. (Worries like: outer space and training cruises and performance reviews.)

Only, like his Granny told him once when he was too young to know what she meant, the body wants what it wants. His body was drunk on words and wonderment and Jim was the kind of warm magnet that any drunk body was going to gravitate itself toward. When he found himself flat on his back in the grass it wasn’t a thought in his head that this mouth on his and this skin under his touch belonged to a _man_ because his poor addled brain had floated along with thoughts of _giggles_ and _smiles_ and how it felt _good_. 

Good was foreign and he’d licked the taste of it right out of Jim’s mouth like a greedy beast that wasn’t half aware of its own hunger. Only good was only good until it was hard and there was no ignoring the way Jim was laying on him like (he wanted to _fuck_ him) and that was every definition of not-good and unacceptable he could think of.

Because Bones was twenty-fucking-nine years old and he was too old to run off thinking about _possibilities_ that expanded one category into two and suddenly he had to redefine what sex was. He told himself it was all alcohol and he’d sleep it off so he did and when he woke up, Jim was a curled ball of a boy-not-quite-a-man yet on the ground snuggling an empty bottle and his stupid bag.

\--

Back to work was far from reality and a return to heavy thoughts like _responsibility_ and _obligation_ and _performance reviews_ until he was elbows-against-an-exam bed, staring blurrily at the PADDs telling him the rest of his life. Everything was clinical-clean around him and he was head-tilt and daydreaming about long grass and Jim and summer sun as they climbed onto the car because some dog that had to have rabies was waiting to eat their ankles.

It was stupid and dangerous and Jim had stared at the dog as he laughed at Bones and made jokes about how scared he was without realizing that anyone with half a lick of sense was going to be scared. The dog circled them and charged the car and tried to get over the bumper but it couldn’t manage more than scraping the paint job all to hell.

That was far-away, somewhere around Kansas and he was in California now. There was the smell of salt, sea and Academy issue shoe polish to fill his brain. So he sighed away those thoughts with other ones that troubled him more and tapped his way through the performance review of some nurse named Christine that thought he had cared.

Maybe he had. Maybe she wasn’t half bad for knowing that.

\--

Jim slept in long pants and no shirt with one sock on and one lost on the floor, snuggled into his blankets like a child. Bones watched him in the middle of the night when he woke up raging thirsty and dreaming about whiskey and water and only ever had one nearby. By the time he woke up in the morning Jim was already half-dressed in his cadet uniform and ready to face the day. 

\--

The first time, Leonard thought, it was nothing more than an accident that they ended up in the same building because Jim had his arm around the girl of the moment who was about as respectable as an off-planet hooker giving it out for cookies to whatever dashing Starfleet idiot happened to show an interest. Her hair was blonde and crinkly and her eyes were dilated like she was high or drunk or just not-quite-human. It didn’t matter because she was _all over_ Jim and he was running his blunt fingertips across her face and arms and letting her touch him however-the-fuck she wanted.

He didn’t care, she could suck his dick in the diner and he’d be talking about the drilling project set to start next year—you know the one Bones? (No he never did). 

The thing was, he was about three-quarters drunk and Jim was fuck-drunk and that girl was banging her elbows and ribs against the table trying to crawl right back into Jim’s lap while the waitress at Edna’s frowned at the three of them and brought ice-cream for the whore and French fries for the rest of them.

\--

_Hey_ he said one morning after Jim’s run and before Jim’s shower when his own mouth was minty fresh and the rest of him wasn’t even slightly ready to keep moving. _You’ve got a physical due._ Jim had cocked a sweat eyebrow at him and spread that lascivious grin across his face.

(We’ve got to work on your pick-up lines, Bones) was making a joke of something that was serious and Jim frowned because he knew that it was and ducked his head like saying _yeah, whatever_ before he was off to the shower. They didn’t set a time exactly and Bones didn’t push him because there was no point in shoving Jim unless you liked beating your head against a brick wall. Mostly, it was pointless.

So it was a week or two or maybe three and Bones spent plenty of time watching the man sleep and eat and work and read and run and figured that was enough to fill out the stupid Academy’s physical form and just about did it before he found himself suddenly on the other side of an exam table with Jim there, arms at his sides, stiff as a scolded child saying:

“So I’m here.”

\--

“This is kind of stupid,” Jim told him when he was leaning back against the raised back of the exam table, knees spread on either side of it with his feet hanging and his hands picking at the crinkling cover. “I’m healthy, you know it.”

“So just answer the questions,” Bones said. They ran through them from name to medical history and there were omissions that ran the lines of erased scars but neither of them much talked about that. “How far can you run?” he asked.

“Hours,” Jim said like it didn’t matter. It probably didn’t to him because when some men said _hours_ they meant that it felt like hours but when Jim said it he meant _hours_ like he had run for _days_ before. Then he was looking back-over-searching, tongue over lips and saying: “what’s that face?”

“What face?”

“Your face. You don’t believe me?”

No, Bones believed him. He had no idea why he leaned back and gave Jim that glare like he wouldn’t believe him even if he did prove it, so Jim _had_ to prove it and they had a treadmill for those archaic old cardiac tests so Jim pulled his shirt off, threw it somewhere and started jogging. 

\--

An hour later, Jim was shiny with a fine sheen of sweat and jogging.

Two hours later, after Bones informed some unfortunate cadet that they were perfectly healthy, Jim was still jogging.

Three hours later, after lunch and handing out tissues as the all purpose cure to the sniffles, he collapsed back into a chair to watch Jim running. “You can stop showing off,” he said.

“You want to try?” Jim asked. His smile was a dare. 

Bones figured, one day—maybe—he was going to be smart enough to say no and mean it with no doubt. There was no beating Jim and sooner or later everyone was going to figure that out. “So I can hear about how good I’m not for the next six months? No.”

Jim just laughed.

\--

_Why_ was the demand across the open space and hands-over-hips and waistbands. 

Bones was rolling his eyes saying: _because it’s a complete physical. Drop your pants_ thinking (Jesus) because it wasn’t that hard for complete strangers to get Jim naked. Complete strangers didn’t know a damn thing about the places on Jim’s skin that he’d seen and maybe they’d been wrapped around and all inside of his body but they didn’t see anything but skin-deep and blue eyes and the presentation of arrogance that Jim gave them. They didn’t see him hang his head, look-to-the-left and tongue-over-lips as he tried to think his way right out of this one. 

“I think you owe me dinner first,” Jim said.

“I thought you’d settle for an appetizer,” Bones retorted.

Jim nodded like it was a _good shot_ and lifted a one-sided shrug before he dropped it again and said: “or those peanuts you find in bars,” instead of _I know you think I’m a whore_. The sentence was a challenge in the air to confirm or deny it. 

“I think we’ve got saltine crackers,” he said like it was a _joke_ that rang like a dented gong and nobody was laughing even if Jim’s lips curled up. Bones was rolling his eyes. “Damn it, Jim. Just drop your pants so we can get this over with.”

So there it was a laugh-like-a-slap in the face that left Bones feeling hot and ashamed and just stupid every way a man could be. Jim’s fingers were at his button and he was saying: “I’ve heard that before,” like it was some kind of joke and not a God-damn tragedy. They were back on a muggy night, half-laughing about something stupid and Jim was saying _too many to count_ like he had half an idea that his body wasn’t meant to be used like that. (Or maybe Bones had it wrong all along.) 

“Consider me surprised,” Bones said. He was keeping a safe distance, watching Jim’s naked shoulders and not his hands. Everything was poison-dangerous and he wasn’t sure which way was up or back. 

“You know,” Jim said as he pushed his pants down off his hips and not-quite-low-enough, “you need to drink less and get laid more, you’d be happier.” His pants weren’t getting any lower but his elbows were out like they were waiting for the will to go straight and one of them would be naked and the other clothed. The idea was stupid but the room was hot anyway. “Look,” was Jim’s attempt at being fair, “it all works. You’ve seen me naked.”

( _Don’t make me do this_.)

Only neither of them knew what they were avoiding.

\--

On a Saturday-verging-to-Sunday he was drunk enough that naked women were the only good thought and he found one that was pretty all on her face and shallow all behind it. (Or maybe, just maybe, he was _shallow_ or learning how to be.) She smelled like something smoky and he took her nowhere but the bathroom where the floors were one shade short of sanitary and he didn’t know her from anything but she sighed like that with his hands pulling her panties down her legs. Her thigh quivered with him on his knees and her heel on the toilet to spread her legs. It was his tongue and her moans and his broad palm rubbing her soft-skin and her hard fingernails against the back of his head. 

His fingers, her wetness and then he was standing and she was calling him _sweet thing_ and rubbing their mouths together while his zipper tore through the oppressive white static of music pounding the walls. Her knees were hard knobs against him as he fucked her against a wall like he hadn’t ever fucked anyone before. Her gasps were like sobs and he _didn’t_ care until it was reckless and heady and _wrong_ but she came with a shiver-shudder-scream.

It was one hell of a production number, he was thirsty and hungry and she was standing her own feet with her panties on the dirty floor and his come on her thighs and he thought (God, she’s _disgusting_ ) but she was just a woman and she knew better than him that sex was sex was _nothing_ at all.

\--

The fourth time, it was just habit to find Edna’s after the bar, floating on drunk bubbles and chewing on French fries while Jim’s date-of-the-moment looked bored and annoyed staring out the window getting ignored. They were arguing ethics and non-involvement and Klingons while she was hissing her annoyance.

Jim would turn his head and kiss her temple and Bones—but never Leonard—would say something outrageous that had Jim raging and they’d be standing on chairs shouting at one another with the waitresses playing referee through their laughter.

\--

School happened because it had to. Somewhere around the second month, Jim got himself voted Treasurer of some club by a chance of a miracle and maybe just to piss off that pretty girl named Uhura who had that look like a viper that was going to _kill you_ just for the audacity of walking too close. Jim liked the chase but he didn’t half know if he liked the girl.

When it wasn’t bitching about this—it was bitching about _her_ and Bones nodded-nodded-nodded his head right along with the cadence of Jim’s complaints.

“You know,” he said, smack in the middle of a tirade, “for such a manly guy, you bitch a lot.”

Jim laughed.

\--

The tenth, twelfth or twenty-second time they found themselves in Edna’s, Leonard’s hands smelled like girl-sweat and he was drinking fizzy water to settle his stomach but not his head because he was six-shots short of being even slightly drunk. Whatever-that-woman’s name was had left perfume stink on his clothes and her lipstick across his mouth. He leaned back in the booth and thought about nothing (and everything) all at once until his head was full of (nothing) and the bell was jingling across the speakers because Jim was falling in through the door.

“Little too much?” the usual waitress asked him.

Jim was all loose-smiles and loose limbs and a sprawl in his walk. “Something like that,” he agreed. He fell sideways into the booth, laying on his back and groaning something like admitting felonies. “Hey Bones,” was a boy in a closet whispering (save me).

Bones didn’t think much, just the vibrating scream of _he got_ fucked.

\--

The thirteenth or twenty-third time, Jim wasn’t limping because he was too _proud_ to bother with that. Or maybe it wasn’t pride but defiance in the face of pain. As if believing that pain was stronger than will was accepting that once-upon-a-time someone must have told him that he was _worthless_ and nobody ever told him any different. 

Leonard wasn’t drunk, he wasn’t drinking, he didn’t get laid and when he saw Jim drop into his seat with a jarring fall of his body, his thoughts spun like psychotic cyclones at the edges of a smirk that dismissed everything as _unimportant_. He figured there were conversations they weren’t meant to have but he couldn’t stop his tongue and lips and teeth from wrapping around: “good fuck?”

“ _Enthusiastic_ ,” Jim agreed. 

“You know,” Leonard said because Leonard was a doctor and doctors said things like: “there are serious health complications from—”

“Seriously?”

“I’m serious.”

Jim was looking-left, wishing for beer and waiting for the conversation to end. Leonard wondered if he’d always been like that or if some asshole with a leather belt had beat that into Jim like screaming (never-trust-anyone). “Have you ever been fucked, Bones?”

“No.” 

The next question was: “have you ever wanted to be?” like Jim didn’t know the answer to the question because they weren’t thinking-weren’t-talking about four months ago in the grass of the summer months and how everything was perfect seconds before Leonard realized that it was _Jim_ or maybe just that _Jim_ had a _dick_. Right now they were on opposite sides of a table with a nervous waitress dropping a plate of fries like she couldn’t get away fast enough. “Then _shut up_.”

\--

_Are you going to be okay?_ Jim asked him when it was the day he had to leave. He was sitting across the room, on his bed, acting like he was reading one of Bones’ old medical texts when he wasn’t doing anything but following Bones’ motions around the room over the top of the PADD. 

Bones shrugged his shoulders because he didn’t damn well know if he was going to get beamed up in one piece of a million and if he made it there whole what came next. For all that he knew they’d all be dead because the simple-training-cruise turned into intergalactic warfare. What he knew was that he was gone for the next six weeks and Jim was all-on-his-own and Bones didn’t like that _at all_.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Bones said before he left.

_You know me_ , Jim said back with a salute.

Yeah. That was the problem.

\--

It was two weeks in space and a cold bunk in a cold room with no snoring next to him. Sickbay was a cold stretch of beds and a colder surgery. There were no lights that weren’t white-bright-fake and nobody to talk to except for the nurses that decided day one that he was too cute to take seriously and ignored his attempts to terrify them. These two were real women, all grown, and they weren’t afraid of the likes of _him_.

He wrote short messages to Jim that ran like: _ate replicated grapefruit this morning—tasted like feet_ and Jim would write back: _like that diner in Nebraska that served vomit?_ and the day would be bright enough to bear while they sailed through space learning how to play starship like real grown ups.

On the fifteenth day he healed a paper cut and a burn and went back to trying to scare the nurses who thought he was _even cuter_ when he tried.

\--

On the twentieth day he got a note that said: _got in a fight_ from Jim with no details and it was another twenty-five hours until he got an answer to (really?) that read: _you can’t even lie in type, Bones_ but didn’t tell him what the fight was about or if Jim had been hurt and he was smacking the keys as much as punching them just to get the message out.

_What was the fight about, asshole? Are you ok?_

Jim must have been laughing because all of his letters seemed crooked even if they were standing up straight. He said: _some girl_ like it didn’t matter and _I’m kind of purple or I was, now I’m kind of green._

So Bones called him an _idiot_ and Jim said: _you love it_ and they changed the subject.

\--

On the twenty-ninth day Jim was working on an essay that he didn’t have enough of an opinion on to write so he picked a fight about the theoretical morality of population control in reference to limited means and complicated but the brutal slayings of infants. Bones argued the side that Jim gave him until they found themselves on opposite sides on day thirty five with no real idea how they’d argued in a circle.

Jim said: _I’d fuck your brain, Bones_ like it was anything but the world’s most disgusting come-on.

He laughed because the alternative was _thinking_ about that one and how he was going to be all alone in his room late in the middle of the night when his body did funny things like demand skin-over-skin and his brain wandered around the thoughts of (Jim) things he had no damn business considering. He was _heterosexual_ with all emphasis on the women and Jim could say sweet-disturbing things all he wanted because that wasn’t going to change.

_I bet you say that to all the doctors_ , he said back after a pause.

The reply was a crinkle of crows-feet around Jim’s eyes when he really smiled whispering: _just you._

\--

_Ate a real grapefruit this morning,_ Jim sent him somewhere in the at the start of the sixth week when they were ignoring brain-fucks, _can’t figure out how it would ever_ not _taste like feet._

Bones laughed and said: _you eat a lot of feet?_

Jim said: _with lips like these, baby?_ because someone must have said it to him once-twice-three times in his life. Bones thought about that until it made his body twist up in strange ways and he was left with the bizarre and brutal realization that had been hanging at the edges of his vision since that-day-in-the-grass.

He said: _chapped?_

So Jim said: _yes, exactly_.

\--

It was the second to last day of the cruise, when everything was packed back into bags and they were so damn close to space-dock that every cadet could taste the smell of home and feel the touch of grass under their boots. Only Bones (and not Leonard) was lying on his bed, fingers stroking across his thigh through his pajamas thinking about thinking about what it must feel like to let someone fuck you.

Thinking about thinking about how Jim had looked at him across the table with that troubling-blankness to his face and said (shut up) because Bones didn’t know things that Jim knew. When his hands slid down inside his waist band and found hot flesh and his mind wrapped around the thought of lips-and-learning-and-(I’d fuck your brain, Bones) he thought he was going crazy before he was getting naked under the blankets with his knees pulled up and spread and fingers that hadn’t ever been curious before exploring.

\--

Bones was back again and Jim was on his bed without socks or a shirt, reading Engineering textbooks. “Change your mind about being a Captain?” he asked.

Jim shook his head no without looking up from where he was, finger running across a line of words that he was absorbing straight through his skin. There was nothing but PADDs stacked around his bed with blank screens and fancy printed labels declaring them to belong to Engineering or Communications or Science or Fiction or Command Procedure or Starfleet Regulations or Class M: A Study and more under the bed, three on Bones’ bed, piles on the desk and four in the bathroom on the sink and floor and back of the toilet. 

Bones was tired so he laid down and found himself staring while Jim kept right on reading. His breath was even, chest expanding and back again, his eyes moving as his tongue went across his lips. He’d be there for hours without moving so Bones stared and thought (I’d fuck your brain too).

Just, it wasn’t anything he was going to _say_.

\--

Exams were those things that Jim complained about because they were _necessary_ and therefore a _waste of time_ while Bones stressed and the rest of the Academy went days without sleeping just trying to cram their brains full of things they had already learned. When they were over and it was done with, there was the celebration.

\--

Later, when he was less drunk and more sober, and all the years after that, Bones never would figure out what he’d said to convince the man he wanted any of it. Whatever it was, it must have sounded so damn good that nobody bothered to care it was a lie. Because he wasn’t at the bar but against a bed in a slum, with a man pulling at his pants and Bones was sucking on someone’s tongue, tasting Cardassian Sunrise until his throat burned. It was backward-sideways-upside down. Then it was too fast and not enough time.

He was shoulders-against-the-bed, legs spread and clamping his teeth squeaking _holy fuck_ when there wasn’t a damn thing sacred about how he wasn’t sure where he was but he knew that he was being fucked by this man with a name that was forgettable. There were hands on his legs pushing his knees up and it was wrong, all wrong. 

“You’re so tight,” was a grunt against his cheek.

Bones was hissing breath through his clenched teeth, feeling split open and hurt while the man started _moving_ and there was supposed to be something that made this worth doing only there wasn’t and he wasn’t drunk enough to make it feel right but stupid enough to say: “I noticed.” Then it was his arm across his face, trying not to gasp but every thrust was a confusion of pain then what-was-that and just rub and used and something tingling that felt like it could be something good. His little drunk mind churned over used up fantasies about white-gold skin that never did become real thoughts because there was no room in him for thoughts when he was filled with stinking breath and hard dick and _disbelief_.

When it was over he was getting tongue-kissed like thank yous and Bones had his fist in shaggy hair with his legs feeling all pulled-muscle and his ass aching so he said: “Blow me” the way Jim would have said it—no shame and no fear and all _orders_.

The man with the forgettable name and the memorable O-face nodded his head and squirmed down Bones’ body.

\--

It wasn’t the day after necessary but the week and a few days after, when Bones was laying the wrong way on his bed because it was a Friday-afternoon and he was free-all-free for the weekend. It was his feet against the pillows, his arms behind his head and he was thinking about nothing like cloudy sunshine.

Maybe he was thinking about being pushed into a mattress and pushed-pulled-fucked until his bones were rattling and nothing made sense because it didn’t feel quite like it was supposed to. Maybe he was thinking about after-that when he was still sore and there was a man with strange hair between his legs with a wicked tongue and hot-wet mouth that looked up at him with a curious twist of humor like a challenge saying (go ahead, I dare you) and maybe Bones had been drunk and it had seemed like a good idea but he’d planted his heels against the bed and fucked his confusion down that man’s throat until it was nothing but _animal_.

So he was having cloudy thoughts about love and sex and fucking and how one wasn’t the other wasn’t the other but the last wasn’t anything at all but the obligatory act of release that was fission in his spine and dirty-mother-fucking prayers on lips. 

The door slid open and Jim was there, throwing his uniform shirt on his desk, dropping something and coming over to kick his bed like he always did saying: _What are you thinking about?_

“Blow jobs,” Bones said. 

“Giving or getting?” Jim asked as he was flopping back onto his bed, reaching for his shoes. “Stick your tongue out.”

Bones stuck his tongue out without caring much about why he was being asked to do it and thought he should have asked why but Jim was whistling across the way saying:

“I bet you’d give good head.”

When he looked over, Jim was rolling his socks up and throwing them into the pile of clothes that needed washed days ago but neither of them were dedicated enough to bother. There was time to waste so they were wasting it somewhere between obligation and recreation. “Have you ever—given a blowjob?”

“To a man?” Kirk said with a scratch at the back of his skull. “No.” But his stare was strange like he was trying to figure out if Bones was asking because he was wanting one and well friends-helped-friends out. The idea was a shiver in his gut and all down his spine. “You?” Jim asked.

“No.”

Then it was silent until it was Jim’s hands on his legs saying: “So, you want a blowjob?” Then it was standing and motion and Jim starting off: “There’s a wet T-shirt contest down at the Bar on the Corner. If that doesn’t get you laid, nothing will.” 

Bones snorted and Jim wasn’t nice enough not to say: “Of course, that’s because I can’t take them _all_ ,” in that gracious way that wasn’t gracious at all.

“So modest,” Bones said.

\--

Years from now, when he thought of nightmares and things he wished-he-didn’t, (like calling _her_ a _whore_ ), he’d remember that he was facing the bar and not the floor when the man came up to him, all dry where Bones was still soaking wet. He’d remember that Jim was across the bar, past the running lights around the dance floor, trapped in the thud-throb-pulse of music, sweet talking a crowd of loyal women all trying to get his wet-shirt off him to see if that was what he really-really looked like. He’d remember thinking (fuck you, Jim) and while the man at his side was thinking (I’d fuck you, boy) and it was one drink and one swallow and one stare.

One eyebrow lifting up, one thought he wasn’t quite ready to have. It was one line: “I’ve got towels,” that should have made Bones burst into laughter but he didn’t because he was moving closer like sniffing this idea out. Until he was sniffing the man and he didn’t smell too bad. Then it was a nod, and a shot and a short-ride-back to someplace he thought wasn’t half bad.

It was kissing until he was dizzy and groping hands stroking the crotch of his pants until he was pushing them off—hands and pants. Until he was on his knees because he didn’t want to see. There were fingers in his ass and he was trying to figure out if the pattern on the couch reminded him of flowers or chickens. He was hard because the fingers knew what they were doing but he was saying:

“Fuck me, already,” like he was that ready for it.

The body was heavy on his back; the pain was slow and sneaky until he was scratching fingernails into upholstery that wouldn’t give. The pause was like hell, the man moaned: “you’re so tight,” against his neck.

Bones was never smart so he said: “I keep hearing that.” 

Then he was being _fucked_ because he asked for it and it wasn’t slow-easy-get-ready-now, it was broad, hurtful hands on hipbones, yanking his body back until his lungs and heart and spine were jarred-jittering-jammed full. It was a cacophony of pain and dissonant pleasure until he was digging teeth into his knuckles cursing tears against his red skin. 

Slap-slam-slap.

He thought (I hate you) but nothing else.

\--

Bones didn’t wake up hung over. He just didn’t wake up at all until there was the grip of four fingers around two of his and the blankets were shifted like a whisper across his cheek. He jerked, and all of a sudden his body was on _fire_ because there wasn’t a part of him that didn’t hurt somewhere or another. Jim was crouching next to the bed in the piss-yellow light that made him look really _gold_ and not white.

He saw the bruises on Bones’ knuckles that his teeth left and he was moving forward without asking permission, shoving down blankets and the rest was there on his body. Above the bones, below his waist where fingers-fingers-thumb were pressed like prints into his flesh and couldn’t be anything but _exactly_ what they were. He _knew_ because Jim knew every bruise for exactly what it was and what it meant and what it took to get there. It was his touch—hot and dry—that made Bones hurt like it was still right _there_ and not the ache of a memory.

Jim was tongue-across-lips and looking at him, at his eyes, and asking him: _why_.

(I don’t fucking know.)

\--&\--  
05.  
 ** _side b: secret in the back of my skull_**  
When the women were gone, Bones was already gone too and Kirk shrugged it off because _it happened_ and there wasn’t ever a reason to worry before. He was one footstep in-front-of the other until he was back in his own bed and it wasn’t like he didn’t notice that Bones wasn’t there it was just that once in a while the man actually got himself laid.

He thought: that wasn’t so bad. He thought: everyone deserves to get laid now and again. He thought: it doesn’t matter to me where he is.

Later (like _too late_ ), he’d remember that.

\--

It was morning right after midnight and he woke up only enough to unglue his eyelids one from the other in a mad stumble toward the bathroom. It was piss-a-river and scratch his face while he thought (maybe I should shave) and considered that he’d have to actually _shave_. So it was (that can wait) and then he was hobbling on his heels searching for his toes, trying to walk right out to the little dorm room where the sun was slanting through the high windows that Bones _always_ , always left open. Like he was a fan of the sun when he spent every morning bitching about it being in his eyes when he wasn’t rolling over on his gut saying: _why are you awake_ in that sleep-thickened morning voice of his that must have been how he talked to his wife. When it didn’t make Kirk roll his eyes it made him have stupid thoughts about calling Bones _honey_ or _sugar_ or maybe _dumpling_ just to be an ass.

Then again he’d said (I want to fuck your brain) and Bones had survived that.

The light was distracting, like bars across the floor that his toes wriggled in while they tried to remember that step-step-step was how this walking thing was done. He was half to thinking (I should stop getting drunk) and wondering why Bones lectured him about this and that and biting his fingernails but he never broke out cirrhosis of the liver. Then again, his hand splayed across his own gut, he wouldn’t look that bad with a beer-gut.

Maybe.

His gut wasn’t ever exactly flat either, never mind how many fucking sit ups Bones watched him do while he was over on his bed cursing at his text-books asking questions about the history of the federation and the order of command authority. Except when he wasn’t because sometimes, when Bones wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, he’d do nothing but count the sit-ups until Kirk’s belly was quivering in exhaustion but he wanted to keep going just because he didn’t want to give up the moment and peace that came with it.

_Show off_ , Bones called him when he did push-ups. _Fucking show off_ when they found themselves in Starfleet Academy gym and it was pull ups and weights and Bones idly toying with the idea of actually working out while Kirk called him names until they were sparring. 

Sometimes he thought Bones fought to lose, like someone had taught him that he shouldn’t ever win. Sometimes he thought that he couldn’t let himself lose without being beat fair and square and that left them nowhere exactly but with Bones pinned to the mat with his palms up and saying: (get off, Jim).

\--

It wasn’t that the world stopped because it kept right on spinning. It was that _he_ stopped, right there, a foot from the bed, seven inches from Bones’ hand flopped out of his blankets, off the bed, wrist limp and fingers falling like a hazard to half-awake and half-asleep people that couldn’t remember how to _walk_. It shouldn’t have mattered but the fucking sunlight was bright and his eyes were squinting and he could see the edge of purple-red and he thought (blood) like it wasn’t strange and wasn’t unreal but just was.

Thinking, not thinking, just maybe thinking something like paper cuts or unfortunate accidents with the dorm doors because they weren’t reliable bastards. Bones-was-hurt was thought in all general terms and no accusations and he was bending his knees because he was just _curious_ and it wasn’t like he was a cat and the world was still spinning so he was crouching at the side of the bed. Inching forward to the balls of his feet that suddenly remembered things like (balance) and then it was his three fingers and thumb with his pinkie sticking out and only the pads of Bones’ limp fingers to turn his hand. 

It was just a bruise until it was about three of them and it wasn’t a bruise but red-purple-spotted bruises and they weren’t even bruises they were _marks_ like rings of teeth that started at the knuckle of the middle finger and went up to the hand and down to the index finger and it wasn’t even the bruises it was the _implication_ and it wasn’t the _implications_ it was the (memory).

It was Iowa, a few years back and he was somewhere between here and there and it was nowhere at all but the blank hot space that was pain in and out and upside down. He was chewing on his fingers while the world moved with a broken rhythm like it was being fucked half as hard as he was—it hurt and didn’t feel like anything but there were two women that he’d already had leaning back against the head board with gaping pink and red mouths and long fingers and they were moaning like it was so _fucking_ hot. 

All he felt and all he was and all he could ever be was nothing and he was _chewing_ on his hand just so he couldn’t scream, so he wouldn’t cry, so he wouldn’t have to say (stop) and taking it because it was anything and everything and nothing all at once.

Bones was moving—here, now—and it was one vision over another because there was Doris-the-librarian and she was looking at his hand with bruises (still, _still_ ) with her mouth all shut and her eyes all red and she wasn’t saying _are you ok_ or _why_ because she knew like he knew that he was nothing and all his scars weren’t romance but tragedy. That he didn’t love her because she was beautiful but because she said (you can stay) when he wanted to read her books but she could lie to herself when it mattered until he came home with proof on his skin and then it was tears-over-lashes. She was pointing her finger and saying _get out_ and he thought (like he should have thought) I don’t want to go but it was hollow and she was right.

Bones was on one elbow, his hair was in tangles, his eyes were black all around the edges like he hadn’t slept and Kirk didn’t think because he _knew_ and didn’t but there it was the blankets were flying back. Bones’ shirt was around his ribs and the bruises over his hips were as livid as the ones across his knuckles and somewhere between this and a memory, Kirk couldn’t breathe.

He thought: _someone fucked him_ but _someone_ hurt _him_ was so brilliant that it filled the room with noise until all he could hear was _why-why-why-why_ and Bones was staring at him.

\--

It tore through him like something ripping, like a bottle flung at a picture frame of Aunt Mar _ee_ until it sizzled and spat and _burned_ and was _nothing_. 

\--

“Damn it, Jim,” was Bones sitting on the edge of his bed with his back all slumped and his hands hanging between his spread knees. There was pain pinching the corners of his mouth and his eyes and he kept lifting a hand to rub the back of his neck (and oh fuck there was a black mark there like a mouth, like a hickey, like teeth, and filthy curses whispering _you’re so tight, you like my dick, take it, you fucking_ slut) and dropping it again like he didn’t have the _energy_.

Somehow, Kirk found himself across the room, by the wall, looking up high out the window, wondering how he got there and what happened in the time between, thinking that he wanted to scream and he wanted to run and he wanted to know what he was supposed to do. Starfleet manuals were running through his head like a mantra of useless rules and none of them came close to this. 

It was starving-man’s-moral’s and he just wanted to hit Bones when he didn’t want to scream at him but he wanted to—

“Can I lecture you about the risks of rough sex now?” Bones asked him.

Kirk just closed his eyes.

\--

Bones had this sister named Devon that sent him a message every-other-day because she was getting divorced and Bones was supposed to _understand_ and there were so many things that she had to say about her life and her marriage and her daughters and she was thankful-he-hadn’t-had-kids-with-(that woman) because it was the hardest part. She talked in long sentences with no periods about Granny and the house and how the stairs were creaking again and there was a water leak somewhere and the other-day-by-the-pond they found a frog and little Susanna almost fell in running away from it. When there was nothing left to say that hadn’t been said, Devon never said: I miss you.

Bones wrote back in five-word sentences. That-must-have-been-interesting. He said nothing about divorce, about life after, about hope, about moving on, about what he’d done to _get over it_. Everything was an awkward rote recitation of facts after another. He never said _I love you_ to his sister when she was all but begging him for it. 

Sometimes, Kirk thought it made sense. Sam sent him five-word-sentences about life far away from here that were as hollow and strange as any newspaper article recording factual events. Kirk wrote back in three-word sentences (sounds-great-Sam) and he never said (I love you) because most of the time he wasn’t sure he did.

Sometimes Kirk knew that Bones loved his sister and he hated the man for being afraid of it.

\--

“Sure,” Kirk said right back to Bones without looking at him because he wasn’t sure he could. “Tell me all about it.”

There was that exhausted hand from nowhere to the back of Bones’ neck again. He was looking away too because his voice was coming across a distance that couldn’t be crossed and he was saying: “did you ever bleed?”

\--

It was six weeks without Bones so he pretended like he had boundaries and respect and he didn’t hack into his computer until the second week and by then, Devon had a pile of messages on the computer that were asking things like: where are you? And Kirk thought that only an asshole would forget to tell his family that he was leaving.

Bones was sending him messages like (I ate a grapefruit) and Kirk wasn’t checking his messages twice a day just once and he wasn’t laughing over the stupidity of the man or (worrying) wondering how the old sawbones was handling flying in space because he was _busy_ doing and learning and running. 

When Devon stopped sending messages it felt like a punch in the gut and Kirk didn’t know why he cared except that he did so he copied her name onto his own computer and he wrote her a letter that went like:

_Devon,_  
I’m Jim Kirk, I know your brother. He’s in space right now on a training cruise—he forgot to tell you because he’s kind of an idiot. He wanted me to tell you he was sorry and he’ll write when he gets back.  
Kirk. 

He thought it sounded good—maybe believable—and then there was the message back in the next day that said:

_Kirk,_  
It’s nice to meet you and you’re sweet. My brother’s kind of an idiot but you’re kind of a bad liar.  
Devon. 

\--

“ _Christ_ ,” was all Kirk could say through his clenched teeth as he turned and it was his fist against the wall and that hurt but it was all pinpricks against disbelief. Once and then twice and he was denting his own knuckles but not the wall—the people next to them must have been trying to sleep because they were kicking back against the wall and Kirk was beating his fist against the wall harder just to make them shut the fuck up.

To make it all shut the fuck up.

To make _Bones_ shut the fuck up. Only he wouldn’t and when Kirk looked back at him, Bones was still sitting there, elbows on knees, just waiting for his answer.

\--

His mother sent him a message saying _this is the truth if you need it_ and an attachment that read in short-crisp-serviceable sentences the exact and total truth. It burned like hot coals in his gut and he hated her as much as he had ever hated her because she didn’t ask him for anything—not even sympathy.

It said: my father had a temper. My mother was a push over. 

It said: and I was nothing so I tried to be whatever they wanted me to be. I was a cheerleader. I was a drunk. I was a runaway. I was a slut. I was an addict when I met your father and he was _perfect_. I punched him in the face and he saved my life sooner or later. My father hit him and he screamed at my mother in front of everyone.

It said: I never respected my mother. I never really knew my father but I loved him.

It said: I fucked some people because they gave me what I wanted. I joined Starfleet because _they could use people like me_. 

It didn’t say: I was confused and lost and alone.

It said: I met your father and I found myself in him. Nothing was perfect except him. 

It didn’t say: We changed one another.

But: Your Father had a fight with your Grandmother and we had a baby and then there was graduation and a wedding.

The ending was inevitable: Then you were born and your father died.

\--

_Fine_ , Kirk thought, _fine_ because he was human. Because it was this or leaving and he’d been left enough to know that he wanted the fight. So he turned, shoulders back, arms across his chest, he said, like it was a conversation, like it was _normal_ like Bones wasn’t a slit-eyed-bastard of a fully-trained-psychiatrist but nothing more than a serpent-tongued-southern-belle.

“So tell me what he did. Slap your ass? Bite your neck. Grab you by the _bones_ and ream your ass until you were screaming? Did you beg, Bones? On your knees right? On a bed? Floor? Over a table? Did he touch you?” His head was tilting and he was waiting to get hit because he always got hit, one eye a little more closed than the other, that loose grin across his face that exploded like a howl into the air because deep in his belly he had a secret that went like this:

(I don’t belong here.)

He had to bleed to get it out.

Bones was staring at him, past his eyebrows, past the fringe of sex-sweat-dirty-bangs hanging on his forehead. “Yes he slapped my ass, yes he bit my neck, yes he grabbed me by the bones and reamed my ass—I didn’t beg and I didn’t scream but I was on my knees on a _couch_ and no he didn’t touch me but I didn’t want him to.” His voice didn’t waver but his hands were shivering because they were smart enough to be ashamed or humiliated.

Kirk closed his eyes and saw black with no lights anywhere. “Why?” He meant _why_ because _someone loved you_ and Bones acted like he’d been beaten down his whole life and had no damn reason to _try_ like he was so fucking _spoiled_ that he couldn’t ever be _right_ again and it didn’t make _sense_ because there were people that loved him more than he could possibly love them.

“Why?” Bones repeated back to him.

Kirk opened his eyes and just _waited_. The answer came in the silence (I don’t know) and Kirk sighed. “Yeah,” he agreed, “me too.” Then he was moving away from the wall. “Get your ass dressed, let’s get some breakfast.”

Because maybe, years ago, he had wanted Doris to understand.

\--

It was two weeks later, in a bar, Kirk was getting another round for the table full of Academy-buddies because drinking alone was a thing of the past and Bones behaved himself when he had an audience of peers. Kirk found them in hallways and offered alcohol and they recognized him from some presentation or another or some demonstration or that one fight so he was cool. There was a tall man with a disgusting smile at the bar, one elbow back and he eyed Kirk like he thought it was attractive.

Then he was looking back over at the table where Bones was sipping his whiskey and rolling his eyes at the misadventures of little boys that thought they knew how to party. His hand was all healed by the wonder of modern medical attention but he still held it like it was tender when he moved it.

“What’s his name?” the arrogant son of a bitch asked.

“Who?” Kirk asked.

“Dark haired one, the one talking.”

Well, that was Bones but Kirk called him: “McCoy.”

The arrogant ass nodded his head and sipped his drink and let his eyes slid over Bones like he’d had that already and remembered how good it was. Sure it was good if you liked that sort of thing. Kirk watched him, all elbows on the counter and then glanced at the bar tender who kind of half-sighed and nodded down at the telephone like saying:

Start something and you’re going to jail, kid.

Kirk leaned forward across the bar, fingers catching the edge of it and whispered real quiet: “I’m sorry.” Then he looked at the arrogant ass. “Fuckable, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” the man said.

“Kind of a prude.”

The man laughed and looked at him like he was looking _down_ at him. “Maybe he doesn’t go for the schoolboy thing because I had no trouble at all.” Like he was proud of himself. Of course he was, they were always proud of themselves. Kirk took a drink of his beer like inviting further confidence an unspoken _is he good?_ “He whimpers,” the man said. Kirk cocked an eyebrow all _does he really_? “Damn near broke the couch fucking him.”

And well—

\--

“Damn it, Jim,” was in his ear and there were arms around his chest. All he felt was slime between his fingers that could have been anything but he thought it was _red_ and maybe _hot_ and maybe that was some kind of divine justice. “You’re going to kill him—stop!” Bones was pulling him backward as hard as he could and he’d never been half as strong as he seemed then. 

There was a body on the floor with blood across his face, pouring out of his nose and over his lips, he was hacking for breath and there were bodies all around them in a circle with the bartender shouting over the sudden silence because there was no sound. Kirk had blood spots on his shirt and felt it on his face and then there was the shiver of arms holding onto him. The throbbing beat of Bones’ heart against him and Kirk put his hands up.

I give. I give.

Bones was a doctor and there was blood everywhere so Bones was in it, on his knees, trying to see the damage.

The bartender looked at him like he might almost have _understood_ but sorry kid—there were too many witnesses to ignore this shit.

\--

It was, they said, assault and battery. It was, they told him, illegal. He would, they informed him, be doing community service.

They asked him, once, why he got into the fight while they eyed his knuckles scraped raw by bone and teeth where he’d beaten that man until Bones had been spitting a river of curses in the bar trying to save his pretty-fucking-face. The man was a perfect surgeon and the patient made a full recovery and for some reason he wasn’t pressing charges and none of these stiff-backed admirals understood why.

They said: why?

Kirk said: he deserved it.

They said nothing.

\--

Bones brought him a cheeseburger while he was raking the grass he’d just spent all of Saturday cutting. He was leaning back against the riding lawn mower with a sweating drink in his hand eying the pile that was only going to get bigger. 

Jim came to lean against it with him, unwrapped the burger and scratched between his still pink knuckles because it itched. The sun was real hot and he smelled awful and it wasn’t like Bones had ever been shy about telling him that before. So he had to have wanted to say it now but he held out his drink instead.

So Jim took a drink out of the straw.

“My ex wife used to say that sharing straws was like tongue kissing,” Bones said.

Kirk didn’t know what to say to that when Bones was holding the cup and his mouth was around the straw and he’d never thought of it that way and Bones never talked about the ex unless he was drunk and raving. When he straightened up again he looked at the sandwich instead of the man and said: “this is pretty good.”

“No pickles,” Bones agreed.

\--

The funny thing was the way that Bones stood there with his hands on his hips and no shirt on like if he stared hard enough Jim was going to take back what he said. It wasn’t funny in any way that any one else would have understood but he couldn’t stop giggling every time he looked at the man’s eyebrow under his carefully brushed hair. 

It was ridiculous because Bones was nobody’s mother and nobody’s wife and nobody’s Granny but he looked like all three of those things wrapped up into one half-naked man with a funny eyebrow glaring like _it was going to make a difference_. 

Kirk was helpless with giggles (and nerves). 

“I’m your doctor,” Bones informed him, “I have the authority to declare you mentally insane.”

“Wait,” Kirk wheezed and fumbled for the camera on his desk. He held it up but he couldn’t stop giggling and it wasn’t _even_ funny except that it was and he was trying to take a picture to send Devon because she’d understand. “Hold still.”

Bones just frowned at him harder, hips shifting and Kirk thought (he’d be a great fuck) that it was just ridiculous as he bit his tongue and took the picture. “I’m not insane,” he said at last between a giggle and a wheeze, “and you’re not stopping me. I’m doing the space jump.”

“You’re going to go into space to jump out of space—why don’t you just…I don’t know—stay on the ground.”

Kirk was wiping wet tears out of the corners of his eyes as he docked the camera so the picture would download. “Where’s the fun in that?” he asked, “also—I want you there. Since you’re my doctor and all.”

\--

He broke his finger when he hit the ground because there had been a whole lot of talking about how to fall but not how to land. He knew how to fall but the landing eluded him so he caught himself all the wrong ways and something snapped and it might have been those ridiculously tight and thick gloves that kept his finger attached at all. 

Bones hit him upside the head as soon as his helmet was off and Kirk couldn’t stop giggling all over again. Thinking (I want to kiss him) and it was nothing he could have stopped so he did kiss him like a dog slobbering all over his cheek. Bones threatened to break his other fingers and it was one of those real _threats_.

Later, after the glove was cut off and the bone was fixed and Bones was sitting in the chair across from him slowly and surely and methodically making sure all the blood vessels and nerves were healing right, he said: “did you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” Kirk said.

“Well, that’s something.”

\--

There was no decision, exactly, to stop drinking. There was no plan to start wasting time in the Academy’s respectable recreation room and it took them as much by surprise as it did anyone when it turned into Thursday-Friday game nights. Thursday they drew a crowd and played checkers and two types of chess. Everyone talked loud and big about strategy and Kirk turned every game into a re-enactment of a past war, a past battle.

Napoleon at Waterloo and he was a fucking genius while everyone kept trying to keep up with him. It was arrogant but there was the slow and steady way that Bones would sit back in his chair and watch him from across the room while he talked and Kirk couldn’t _stop_ if it meant Bones was looking at him. Sometimes he saw the rest of them, sometimes he cared, now and again he thought one or two of those girls were pretty enough to take an interest so he did and that was all momentary and no sex.

Uhura with no first name showed up a few weeks in and scoffed at him for being a show-off. He sweet-talked her in rough-edged Andorian and she turned him down in steady-sure Romulan because it was the language of warriors.

Fridays were poker nights and they sat around with jack-and-coke mostly coke and never jack except in their imaginations and every third weekend when the security officers on duty were willing to play with them and forget the alcohol so long as they shared. There was a crowd of ten and all of them had tells that were so easy to see that Kirk felt almost bad about slow-playing them into a false sense of superiority. He let them win for two weeks while Bones smiled into the lip of his cup with a shake of his head.

Late at night, on their way back to the room, Bones would punch him on the arm. “It’s cheating when you lose on purpose.”

So week three he showed up and won and won and won and won and his head must have gotten swollen from the smile he couldn’t quit while he placated and praised and talked big and loud. Then it was the last round and everyone was all out of pebbles and buttons except Bones who ran his tongue across the rim of the cup before he took a drink.

“Oh fuck,” Kirk said.

Bones didn’t react but he took the pot.

“That was cheating,” Kirk said when they were crawling out of their clothes for bed that night.

“And you’re kind of an ass when you’re winning,” Bones said.

\--

Summer was weeks away, just past the last bit of spring. Bones was mumbling rude things about teachers and exams in his sleep and waking up before dawn every morning to read over his stupid books until Kirk was sleep-deprived and ready to strangle him. If the man would read to himself it wouldn’t be a problem but he read everything out loud and that was frustrating and dangerous.

It was between humping the mattress, jacking off in the bathroom over words with multiple syllables he didn’t quite have the definitions for but dripped like honey off a southern tongue or strangling Bones just so he’d shut up. Mostly he woke up and rolled over and glared at him.

“You look like a blue-eyed chipmunk,” Bones said once in a while. 

Kirk yanked the blankets over his head and suffocated himself back to sleep or got up and walked stiff-legged to the bathroom. When he came out, Bones would still be reading but it was easier to ignore and sometimes Kirk would just listen to him and sometimes he find something of his own to read or he’d run.

\--

“If you’re done jerking off,” Bones said through the doorway, shouting over the sound of the shower. (Kirk wasn’t done, but that was beside the point probably.) “My sister says you have to come back to Georgia with me over the summer.”

“Your sister says?” he shouted back. There was water in his mouth and his hand on his dick and it was just a strange conversation to be having under the circumstances. He hit the button that turned the water off and Bones was still shouting.

“Yes.”

Of course it was Bones’ sister that wanted him in Georgia. Kirk wiped his face with his wet hand and leaned back against the wall of the shower. There were no thoughts that weren’t bad thoughts (he still had his hand on his dick) and he was all out of better ideas that didn’t involve the relative history of the Federation because he had an exam on that soon. He ran through a few hundred lines of protocol while Bones scratched designs into the door with his fingernail.

“Look, Devon will come find you if you don’t come willingly. So just say yes so I can go tell her we’re coming.” Bones was rolling his eyes now. 

Kirk thought about asking him (would you go without me) and didn’t so he said: “If it’s that serious. But don’t think I’m going to be abstinent the whole summer like last year.”

Bones laughed and said something that Kirk didn’t quite make out that sounded a lot like _you can fuck my ex-wife_ and then he was gone and Kirk was shaking off that thought and finding another as he hit the water and got back to his morning routine.

\--


	6. rooted fast to the earth/our love's confusing, (but it never gets dull)

The thing about Georgia was that Bones had sprinted right out of the state when he was eighteen dragging his girl with him to Old Miss and a future that was big and terrifying that he wasn’t half-convinced that he wanted. He’d signed up to be a doctor because it seemed like an ok idea and Jocelyn had been impressed and he’d signed up for scholarships because she said she’d let him have her. When he was all there and ready to go she had told him _no_ and he’d refused to take that shit for an answer.

When he thought about it, he thought about her front porch where she cried and he kissed her until the tears were dried tracks on her face. Her daddy was frowning at him through the screen and her mother was breathless like it was a romantic poem in action. Jocelyn was a summer’s day forget lovely and temperate. 

Then he thought of his porch and her face as he didn’t-quite call her a whore and she slapped down her terms to breaking his heart before she left with tears in her eyes. He watched her go and he had to leave because staying in Georgia was staying close to her and it was nothing he could take. 

“So,” Jim said when they were out of the air and on solid ground. “This is Georgia?”

“This is it.” Red clay and peaches and _home_ or what it used to be. He looked at Jim who was looking around like he was waiting for some woman with dark hair to fling herself at them shouting _I’m so glad your home_ and Bones rolled his eyes at him. “This way.”

\--

“They don’t own a car?” Jim asked after the first mile when his shirt was soaked straight down his back and under his arms. He was shifting the bag from one shoulder to the other looking for relief from the wet heat that hugged him like a damp glove. “Is it always hot like this?”

They didn’t own a car and they didn’t own a horse because everything they needed was within walking distance and if it weren’t there were always friends and family that were more than willing to trade a ride for fresh biscuits. It was simple-simple country living and nothing that Bones could have explained to Jim. So he shrugged his shoulders and pointed them ahead down the road toward the line of trees that would turn into a path that would take them straight to the house his grandfather and great grandfather and great-great grandfather had lived in.

\--

There were two babies in the yard, one of them about three—maybe almost four—and that was Susanna with the pigtails who was afraid of little old frogs while the pudgy-legged baby blowing bubbles with her tongue was little Jenny with Granny’s dark curls. Jim stopped at the edge of the yard and mopped his hand across his forehead while he dragged in heavy-damp breaths until his lungs had to be soggy.

Susanna was picking flowers, throwing them at her sister saying: take it, sissy, take it. Look-its-pretty.

Bones thought their father must have been a bastard for walking out on them. (He thought, just about the only thing he ever did right was telling Jocelyn no when she was crawling over him asking for a baby.) Susanna was in Jenny’s face until Jenny was crying.

“Susanna Marie!” Devon shouted.

“I didn’t do nothing!” the little girl screamed back before she was crouching down shushing her sister all _shhh, sissy, shhh, you’re not hurt_. 

Jim didn’t move so Bones left him and went over to pick the baby up while her sister stared at him with that same ferocious glare her mother had, ready to kick him anywhere she could reach if he didn’t start explaining himself right about _now_ because he was something she’d seen in pictures and never that she could remember in real life. 

“I’m your Uncle,” he said. Jenny looked at him all but cross-eyed with spit on her chin and her finger half-in and half-out of her mouth. “You hush,” he said to the baby, “nobody hurt you.” Because his Daddy had said it to Devon and to him when he picked them up out of the dirt and dusted off their knees and hands and set them on their feet. Mommy kissed their scraped palms and sang them songs about june-bugs but Daddy told them to stand up on their own so they didn’t ever let anyone knock them down.

\--

“You can’t pick up one without the other,” was how Devon said hello to him two years later as she took her baby right out of his hand and crouched low enough that Susanna was monkey-crawling onto her back. Then she was motioning him toward the house and looking back at Jim still hanging near the trees like he was going to change his mind _now_ and run the other way. “If you’re Jim Kirk, you better come on up to the house too.”

Bones grabbed the blanket before he followed after them and threw it over the old bench outside the front door. Jim was behind him, looking uncomfortable like he wasn’t _sure_ and crossing this threshold meant that you were in and there was never getting back out. So Bones turned back to look at him while Devon was putting her girls down and telling Susanna to go wash her hands and not to play in the water. Granny was asking something from the kitchen that Bones couldn’t hear but it sounded like his name back when it was _Leonard_ and nothing in the world was more important than his Granny’s chicken and biscuits.

“Need me to hold your hand?” he asked.

Jim shoved him through the doorway and there they were in his house with the cool air whistling out of the vents and the smell of flour and pepper and fat bubbling from the kitchen. He pointed up the stairs first and Jim was going to ask him why they weren’t going to say hello but Granny was shouting like a phantom:

“Don’t you come into my kitchen stinking like no pig, Leonard. You make sure your friend’s respectable too.”

\--

They found respectability between what was once his bedroom and now doubled as a storage closet and the bathroom where they kept the little squeeze-tubes of body wash that smelled like vanilla and left him feeling entirely too close to Jim. Jim was brushing his teeth because he was _nervous_ and that was just about ridiculous when the man had jumped straight out of an space ship all the way through the atmosphere straight into gravity.

“You about finished?” Bones asked him when he’d swapped his sweaty shirt for a clean one and changed his socks too. Jim was frowning at himself and Bones and tugging his ratty T-shirt before he nodded and followed.

It was down the stairs and around the corner and straight into the kitchen. Granny was turning back from the bubbling-big-black cast iron frying pan full of chicken and grease. “My, my,” she said as she looked at Jim, “you’re just about the prettiest thing to walk through that door since Ms. Jackson Elementary came by to sell us cookies.”

“It’s the highlights,” he said with a gesture toward his hair, “they’re natural.”

Bones rolled his eyes and stepped up to kiss Granny on the cheek; she pecked him back and spread her flower-white fingers down his shirt sleeve. “Missed you,” he said because now that he was there, back in her kitchen, he thought he never missed anything half as much. 

She caught his chin and turned his face and gave him a stare that said: _boy, you don’t know half the things I want to say to you but oh-just-you-wait and I’ll let you have it._ She said: “now you boys don’t have long before the game so find yourselves something to put in your bellies.”

\--

The game was _the_ game, of course. The first summer baseball game for the local league that was open to anyone age ten to a hundred that wanted to play. Little boys in pinstripes were clinging to the fences shouting at their brothers-cousins-fathers to _hit that ball_ and the whole damn town was sitting in the bleachers with big hats and open baskets, sharing food one with the other. Commenting this-and-that and oh-my did you hear that—why yes I did. Jim was leaning against his shoulder for safety and familiarity and smiling at the strange faces of little-old-southern ladies that wanted to have their way with him.

“No problem finding you a date,” Bones mumbled around a chicken leg.

“I think they’re looking at you,” Jim whispered.

“No see,” he said and threw the bone over into the trash before he pointed his finger across the way to Mary and Jane’s basket because they had the best damn preserves a kid ever tasted and nice enough smiles that he was sure they’d share with him even if they were _her_ friends from way back. When they handed him a spoon of something orange he thanked them and licked it once before falling in love _all over again_. “I’m taken. Don’t matter how many years goes by, don’t matter where I go, don’t matter what else I do—as far as they’re concerned,” with a nod toward the little old ladies swooning over Jim, “I’m no good. Someone already took me.” Then he spread the preserves across a biscuit and handed one to Jim.

“She here?” Jim asked.

“No.” Because if she were—he wouldn’t be.

\--

Waking up in Georgia was a shriek and a squeal and then the heavy-heavy-thud of feet over wood. His door was being pushed open and Jim was jerking awake up on the mattress while Bones lifted his head off the pile of pillows he was using as a bed. Susanna was slamming the door shut while the baby wailed somewhere.

“Girl, you better get back out there before your Mama finds you hiding,” he said.

Susanna fidgeted and wriggled and said: “I didn’t mean it.”

Devon was shouting: _Susanna Marie!_

Bones was up to his feet and all tired-not-rested, having strange dreams about losing a few years except for the constant low-drone of a snore on his bed. Jim yawned as he rolled onto his back, eyes wide like he was waiting for violence. Bones picked the girl up by the arm over the elbow and below the shoulder and she grabbed hold like any kid would, climbing onto his back. 

Devon was holding the red-faced baby with the pinched fingers looking angry pink and purple. Jenny was sobbing and Devon was angry and Susanna burst into tears that left the back of his neck wet long before he had any idea what was going on. “What happened,” Devon demanded from Susanna, “Lenny put her down. Susanna—”

Maybe it was the tone in her voice or maybe it was too damn loud or—he didn’t know—but Jim was pushing the old wooden door to his bedroom shut with a click that stopped everyone but the sobbing baby. Devon looked at him like she didn’t much understand and Susanna was willing to take any reprieve from a lecture she could get.

\--

 _We don’t whip anyone in this family,_ Bones said long after breakfast when they had five minutes to lag behind Devon and the two balls of fury that she’d given birth to. He wasn’t half-sure why he said it except for the click of the door that morning and how Jim hadn’t come out for damn near an hour after.

“Ok,” Jim said.

\--

It was three AM and nobody sane was awake but he was padding his way down the hall past the open doorway where baby’s breath was making melodic lullabies. Down the steps, over the creaking one, he was lifting himself across the rail to hit the ground as soft as he could manage. Everything was different in the dark but it was only so many steps straight out the front door to the front porch. The moonlight caught the screen and made it glitter and the lightening bugs making love were shining in the dark.

Devon was sitting in the old rocking chair, wrapped up in Mama’s old quilt with a bottle of hard lemonade against her knee and tears in her eyes. Leonard didn’t have much that he could say to her and he hadn’t said anything to her for months that was half of what she thought she wanted to hear. 

“You know,” she said and her voice didn’t waver but she didn’t look at him either as he dropped down to sit on the porch next to her without a word, “I used to think I wanted to love someone the way that Daddy loved Mommy. You know—crazy in love, like your whole soul was on fire and there was _nothing_ else in the world that meant anything to you.”

The house was rough against his bare back and the air was cool between his bare toes. He wasn’t looking at her because she wasn’t looking at him. They were just watching lightening bugs making love. She handed him an almost-cool glass bottle of something yellow and sweet and all alcohol and he thanked her. “Now?”

“Well now I know I can’t love nobody like that. My girls, maybe.” There was a tear on her cheek that was slipping to her chin.

Leonard pulled the cap off his bottle. “At least that’s someone,” and he raised the bottle to tap against hers.

So she didn’t say _what do you know_ because she was sipping her sweet-yellow-alcohol and drowning her doubts and making herself into someone’s mother for another day. Their daddy had spent his mornings out here, on this porch, sweet talking his dead wife just to get enough energy to smile for them across the breakfast table. When he lost that—he lost everything and they lost him too.

Leonard rubbed the back of his neck and he wanted to say something, he wanted it to make sense—he wanted her to feel better but all he had was the knowledge that years later, it still hurt like an infected wound and no amount of scrubbing was going to get it clean. Because he’d _loved_ (his wife) her until there was nothing left of him and he’d been blind with it and stupid and he lost it but every part of him that could remember anything remembered that it _loved_ her. So he sighed, “I’ll beat him up for you.”

Devon laughed, “oh boy, you can’t even beat up girls.” 

\--

“Leonard,” Granny said long into the second week, “Rich and Dale and Heywether called to see if you were interested in a friendly game of baseball.” Her words were soft like yellow petals of sticky flowers as she sat in the sun wearing her straw-hat and plucking the chicken that their neighbor Sam had killed and brought over to thank her for all she was doing. The front of her apron was covered in feathers and streaks of blood.

Jim was sitting in the old rocking chair—blue-eyes reflecting the light while he watched her work without a word. Late at night when everyone else was sleeping he said: _your family’s strange_ and Bones understood. “There are unfriendly games of baseball?”

“Oh sure,” Devon agreed, “Lenny went streaking down Main Street during the Thanksgiving parade one year after he lost a not-friendly game of baseball.”

Bones rolled his eyes but Jim had a wicked smile on his face like he wanted to know _more_ and Devon was going to be his best friend _ever_ until he knew all her secrets. Granny was hushing them because the babies were playing nice and rowdy-adults made for rowdy-babies. “I think,” she said as she twisted another handful of feathers, “you should go, Lenny. Take your boy with you.”

She said it like she meant it, because people owned people around here. He was Devon’s brother and nothing else except when he was Jocelyn’s beau and Jim was his boy or his friend because he was and there wasn’t anyone else in the whole damn county that had any rights to him. But she said it like she didn’t mean it, like boy was _boy_ and it wasn’t.

“Maybe I don’t want to play baseball,” he said.

“Maybe I don’t want to see your face around my yard looking like that no more. Go play baseball, get yourself into some fool trouble and say hi to Jared at the station for me.”

\--

Jim said: _I don’t know how to play baseball_ like he was admitting he was a virgin. Around here, around this group of boys-that-never-became-men, it was about the same damn thing. So Bones pulled him to the side on their way down the road and explained it to him using twigs and sticks and reciting all the house-rules that he remembered. Jim stared and then nodded and then they were on their way.

“Oh hell, yeah!” Heywether was shouting like they were still in high school and the season was all riding on one good hit. “Baby Boo is back!” He was laughing all over himself with the others were shoving shoulders and hands and Jim was looking left at him like he couldn’t wait to hear the explanation behind _that_. 

“It’s like this,” Rich said with a slithering tongue because he wasn’t all-human but we didn’t always talk about that. “Back when we were _boys_ , Baby Boo here was all sweet on the coach’s daughter and she was a real fine piece that we call called the _wretched bitch_ ,” echoed around the circle all at once, “but her Daddy called her _baby doll_ ,” echoing, “and baby only had eyes for her beau, Baby’s Boo.”

“Thank you,” Leonard said.

“I like Bones better,” Jim said. 

Well, that made two of them. Bones picked up a bat and the crowd took a step back and it was one inning of playing sloppy and Jim running the wrong way before they were upping the stakes and Rich was shouting: _I’ll take that bet_ before he dragged Bones over to say (you’re bluffing right?)

More or less. He just hadn’t figured out if he wanted to win or lose.

\--

Jim was carrying a fist full of jeans all the way home, grinning like a fool. Leonard was twenty-nine just about thirty and there wasn’t a single damn thing to grin about when it came to winning the jeans off someone else’s ass but the light was dim and the woods were full of shadows like he was just a boy. Jim was laughing about bluffing and high on the thrill of winning something—on being clever—and it made him _dangerous_ in ways that Bones hadn’t put too much thought into.

He grabbed the first branch they passed that was low enough to pull himself up with and then it was knees and heels and arms until he was up on that one and going for the next. Jim was on the ground, staring up saying: _Strong thighs_.

Bones laughed, leaning down so his chest was across the branch and his arm was hanging down. He thought (I’d fuck your brain too, Jim) and motioned for the jeans. “There’s no point in winning them if we don’t do anything with them.”

So he hung them in the trees like a line of victory flags.

\--

“Boy,” Granny said to him—low and quiet—when Devon was outside with the babies and Jim was half-asleep in the hammock between the lover’s wedding trees. Bones was leaning against the glass doors at the side of the kitchen just watching the breeze pushing the leaves and Jim and trying to think about anything about old stories of old men. Like the story went, those trees were planted by the very first McCoy’s that ever set foot on this land as a wedding present one-to-the-other and if you fell asleep under them, in that hammock, you’d dream of your true love. Daddy said he dreamed of Mommy under those trees—years before he met her—and when he saw her face he knew she was the one and _only_.

“Yeah?” he mumbled back. (He wasn’t wondering what Jim was dreaming about.)

“You know I’m going to love you no matter what you do,” Granny said, “and I’m going to love you no matter how far away you go.” He nodded _yes_ because he knew that sure enough. “And you know that I haven’t ever been more ashamed of you than I’ve been of you recently.” Bones looked back at her, across the quiet kitchen where Daddy was sitting just before he stood up and said: _I’m going to lay down_ but he never got up again. Granny was rolling out pie-dough with the old wooden roller, shaking flour down onto her counter top.

Leonard thought, because he already knew, there wasn’t a point in pretending. He said: “Do you want me to tell her that it’s never going to be okay?”

Granny slammed the rolling pin down across the countertop with a crack that left him flinching but he was a big-strong-boy now and he didn’t stop looking back at her. “God-damn you and your Daddy too. Maybe you’ve got no damn good reason to even _try_ but she _does_ and she’ll be alright, so if you got to lie just to say something nice then _God-damn_ lie.” She was shaking furious and ready to chase him out of her kitchen with a wooden spoon she never smacked more than knuckles with. There were things he wanted to ask her, things he didn’t understand but she was white-livid around the edges and there was no fairness in her. 

“Alright,” he said.

\--

Jim discovered the swing over the lake with all the vigor of a twelve year old. There wasn’t anyone allowed on this property or in that pond until they were twelve years old and already knew how to swim. It was a rite of passage around here over the summer, to get your first chance to swing out from the big tree and fly-flop-fall into the water. Jim did it again and again and again until he was breathless and laughing, laid out across the bank making mud with his body.

Bones was digging naked heels into the dirt with a dry-sun-burnt back and staring at the tall grass and smelling nothing but minnows and baby fish from the water. The lake was better for really swimming in but that was across town and it was better for rowing in anyway. 

“What’s wrong?” Jim asked like nothing could be wrong here. Not here, not under the trees and next to the grass and wrapped up in the smell of wood polish and fresh hot-breakfast every morning. He was on his elbows in the mud just looking at him. “Is it Devon?”

Yeah. 

\--

When he thought of something to say, he found her in the nursery with her baby snoozing in her arms and she never looked happier or sadder all at once. Her finger was a slender touch across Jenny’s pink cheek and you looked the same when you were crying as when you were dying for happiness. She was rocking with her toes and humming a song and he didn’t much want to interrupt but he had to say it now or he wasn’t going to be able to say it like he meant it.

“Daddy said the one means you’re never lonely because even when they’re gone, they’re always with you and if this—asshole—wasn’t that for you then he wasn’t the one and you haven’t lost nothing worth having.”

Devon looked up at him. “What if he was?”

“Then you’re fucked,” Leonard said to his big sister because they were both all grown now and they could say fucked and laughed over it because they both knew the truth. He nodded his head because it was the best he had to offer.

“You were lonely,” Devon said. She said it like it made a difference. Like it was something profound on page ninety-five of the romance novel and any second now, someone was going to realize they were head-over-heels in love with some fool or another. Then they’d be fucking until the bad guy kidnapped the heroine. 

Leonard stopped half into the hallways and looked back at her. “She was the one, Dev.” Because she was and there wasn’t ever going to be another one. 

\--

 _So you went that way, did you_ was the old man Jacobs’ summation of the situation when Bones showed up at his shack asking for a rowboat to take out on the lake. Bones frowned at him with a _no_ because whatever way that Jacobs thought he went that ended with Jim wasn’t the way he’d gone at all. It nagged him the way his fingers still hurt now and again like an eternal testament to stupidity.

“No wonder you were Baby’s Boo,” Jim was mumbling around the rim of his bottle as he stared up at the stars twinkling over their heads. The water was lapping like lazy kisses against the side and Jim was lying back against the damp bottom of the boat. “I think I’d marry you too.”

“It’s nothing special,” Bones said. He was leaning back against the other side, he hand hanging onto the side and the other down across his thigh to where the bottle was between his legs. “See, around here, all the boys bring their girls out to the lake when they want to get lucky. If you can’t get your girl out of her panties in old man Jacobs’ rowboat than you’re not a real man.”

“How’d that work out for you?” Jim asked.

“First time I made her orgasm was out here,” floating along on water like lazy clouds and she’d been breathing so hard, so twisted up in knots and needing, her fingers across his wrist and he didn’t figure out until the third or fourth time what he’d done to make her scream without sound like she did, jerking and stiff and then _wet_ -wet- _wet_. 

“How’d you do that?” Jim asked.

Bones figured that she was in Georgia and she could hear him talking about her because her pretty-pink ears were burning and it wasn’t like she was going to stay indoors all summer. Sooner or later, they were going to meet on the street and she’d smack him for saying: “With my fingers that time,” because those were their secrets and not Jim’s but he said it anyway.

Then it was quiet and Jim was tonguing his bottle like a faithful lover before he was rolling side to side in the rowboat and working his hips like he was mimicking something he only saw in his head. “How do you fuck in a rowboat, Bones?” He lifted his head and looked at him, “doesn’t it tip over?”

He wasn’t drunk but Jim was and Bones didn’t quite know what he was doing as he grabbed his bottle and folded forward, on his knees between Jim’s legs because they were open for him. Then it was one hand against this groove and the other over there, he let his knees slip backward as Jim’s breath did funny-strange things and it was one false move from being body-to-body under the stars. 

“You have to go slow,” Bones said.

Everything was dangerous there. Jim was tipping his head a little to that one side, moonlight across his face and his pink tongue on his upper lip. He didn’t say _I’d let you fuck me_ with words because he said it with the way his leg bumped into Bones’ side and it was nowhere either of them belonged so he didn’t know why they were even here. Just that he wanted to show Jim this because nobody had ever shown him this—nobody had taken the time, nobody had _cared_ the way they hadn’t fed him hot breakfast in the morning and buttoned his jacket while he bitched and whined about how it wasn’t cold but Mothers were worriers and you’ll-do-this-for-me-right? 

Jim’s hand was lake-water damp and cool on his face because he was suddenly too hot, and it wasn’t a kiss just the bump of their foreheads. Jim didn’t ask him for a God-damn thing and Bones didn’t have anything to give that wasn’t already used up. 

“I’m not wearing any panties,” Jim said. He didn’t know what it meant and neither did Bones but when Jim tipped the rowboat over it didn’t matter because they were two idiot boys swimming with drunken fishes until they were exhausted and dragging the rowboat back to shore with slippery hands.

\--

Jim was asleep long before dawn so Bones had to creep like a little bug right out of the room and down the stairs, over the banister and sneaking fingertips along the wall in the milk-gray darkness of the early morning. Granny was humming as she mixed her biscuit dough, her hair was pulled up in bun at the back of her head with little wispy curls hanging out here and there. 

He was twenty-nine-almost-thirty but he dropped down to push his back against the cabinet and watched her apron twitching while he arms moving like he had sat next to his Mommy and then her when he was nothing but a boy. 

When she scooped the dough up with her finger and handed it down to him he took it and chewed it because it needed a taste-test. “It’s good,” he said to her. There was flour on his shoulders and in his hair and it didn’t feel like home.

“Are you going to talk?” she asked him as she started rolling the biscuits out. He was half to asking her _do I have to_ when she went right on saying: “What I can’t figure—and you got to tell because you’ve been dying to say it since you stepped into my kitchen again—is who it was that hurt you because I damn sure know that your boy up those stairs didn’t do it. I bet he just about killed whoever did, didn’t he?”

Leonard was picking at flour on his pants with something that felt like tears in his eyes and he didn’t want to say (I don’t know) just because he didn’t want to answer so he said: “I don’t even know his name,” like something burning his throat. 

The smack of the spoon against the top of his head was like _coming home_ when he hadn’t been able to find it years but his Granny turning back to her biscuits like she’d done no-such-thing while she said: “don’t you ever treat yourself like that again, do you hear me, your _Mama_ is _turning over_ in her grave.” She beat the dough until it was just about tough and no amount of magic was going to fix it, then she was fighting mad. “Tell me your boy did right by you.”

So Leonard looked up at her and wanted to say _he’s not my boy_ but he said: “he beat the living hell out of him.”

Granny nodded once. Then she was rolling the ruined dough up and throwing it in the trash, dusting her hands of it like she did of this whole stupid situation and she waited until he was standing there mixing flour to sugar and she was adding in powder before she said: “you know what’s happening, don’t you?”

Standing next to his Granny with nothing but his good soul and his big heart, he just didn’t have the space or time to find a lie so he nodded his head and he said: “yeah.”

\--&\--

**_side b: our love's confusing, (but it never gets dull)_ **  
Family was that word in the dictionary with the pretty picture next to it and anyone that was raised on earth slapped on smugly-happy-connotations about things like _love_ and _acceptance_ and _home_ like _home_ was anything to aspire to. Kirk’s home had been a mattress in a bedroom where he laid on his back with a book in his hand and another four at his side, sipping something from a straw and waiting for the dreary reality of life to keep dragging right on past. 

_Family_ was nothing but another spelling word that he’d stood in front of the class and recited when he was five-almost-seven and got a gold stamp on his hand because he was a _good boy_ for studying. 

Grandmother, if he’d looked for it, would have had a picture of a withered old woman used up by life with no sympathy in her soul and a tissue in her pocket because twenty three hours out of the day she was sniffling for the son she lost. That other hour she was making faces at Sam the Smart Boy because he looked like his father and Kirk never figured _before_ that there was a certain cruelty to that too. Like Grandma Laura hadn’t ever seen them like they were their whole life. It was Sam-the-Smart-Boy and he was George the second like George the first only he wasn’t going to go off and marry no girl like Winona or shout at her (bad, bad words). There was Jim-that-Other-One who was _just like his mother_ and that was like saying he wasn’t _welcome_. So Grandmother had a picture of a bitch and he’d always known that it wasn’t _like that_ for most people but he had no idea what to do with a real live woman that lived up to every expectation of what a Granny should be.

Sister was nothing he’d had or ever wanted and Mother was nothing he’d ever seen _in real life_ until he found himself watching Devon running after he baby girls in the yard with her fingers out like tickling tendrils. Susanna was giggling and screeching as she ran barefoot in the grass while Jenny was rolling onto her belly and watching from the blanket, blowing spit bubbles with her tongue while she laughed-and-laughed-and laughed.

Then again, it was bedtime with Devon on the floor and Susanna in her lap, sucking her thumb and they were reading Thumbelina _again_ but Devon read it like it was the first time and Susanna touched the holographic pictures with a child’s wonder and the cast of blue-green-gold light across her cheeks and half-asleep eyes. 

But it was Granny in her rocking chair in the back sitting-room with her quilt across the frame and her old fingers that seemed too deft and too quick to belong to a woman that was half the age that she must be with her hair as silvery as moonlight. It was the way that Devon gravitated toward her and Bones too, like she was the center of their universe and Kirk stood at the edge and watched. 

He didn’t know why but he knew like any kid who ever should know, this woman would make it _all ok_ and if she couldn’t there was chocolate milk and cookies and the safe-warm-quiet arms that would hold you until all the tears were gone and you had the courage and strength to do what you had to.

\--

“Boy,” was Devon’s voice from the kitchen down-stairs like she had no respect for people trying to sleep past sunrise. (Maybe she didn’t because none of them ever did.) Her laughter was one tipping-point away from insane across the floorboards. Kirk rolled toward the sound, staring out the open door, blinking himself awake just to hear what came next. 

There was a tinny noise like a radio being turned down-then up—and he thought Bones was trying to muscle his way to controlling the dial but Devon wasn’t going to let him win. Granny said something too quiet to hear and Jim was crawling out of bed because he wanted to see this.

“Mommy!”

“Oh don’t you worry, baby girl.” Then a rough shove and the music was sudden loud, all motion and no stillness. The house was vibrating with the sound and Devon was singing right along with the words like it was a chorus to her life and a victory scream going:

 _ain’t no woman like a southern girl_.

“You’re ridiculous,” was Bones’ whisper and then “I’m not…” and then “Devon…” but Kirk was tiptoeing off the steps and finding his way back through the sitting room with the quilt frame to the back exit of the kitchen because he wanted to see this without being seen.

Devon was shaking her head, hair flying, wooden spoon in her hand singing with the music that was a beat in the walls. Granny was sitting at the table with the little girls with gaping mouths sipping orange juice and Bones was—

Bones was arms-over-chest, frowning at his sister who kept smirking at him like she knew a secret he wasn’t about to tell. When she hit him with the spoon he grabbed her hand and it was grapple-shove-push until he was holding the spoon over her head. Devon was clawing-mad but Bones was singing into a wooden spoon with a grin and the whole damn world just about exploded because there was sunlight in Georgia that was hot as a supernova.

Devon was laughing like tears-in-her-eyes and Granny _was_ tears-over-lashes with a smile.

\--

“Sunny,” Devon called him with a whistle, “I’ve got to go into town. I think you should go with me.” But it wasn’t a question because it was never a question when it came to orders-phrased-like-suggestions and these strange-strange southern women. Bones was smiling over on the hammock where he was half-asleep and he was saying:

 _Just say yes, Jim_.

So he shrugged and then they were walking for miles from the house in the middle of the trees to the town beyond them. There was nothing but time to talk and neither of them were saying a word, just enjoying the peace of the day and the wind breathing through the leaves. He had his hands in his pockets, stepping through red-Georgia-mud and Devon was pulling her hair up in a twist off her neck because it was _hot_.

“Are you fucking my brother?” Devon asked him like it was a conversation about breakfast. (Great pancakes, Granny but these eggs, Jesus, these eggs are to die for.) She looked at him right out of the corner of her eyes like she could tell if he were lying before he even answered.

“No,” he said.

Her nod wasn’t surprised and then she said: “but you want to.”

That was none of her business and he thought he should tell her that because somewhere there were lines and talking about her brother like that—it seemed like a line. What the fuck did he know when she was ten-eleven years older than him with two babies and a lifetime of knowing Bones-as-Leonard, her brother. 

So he said: “was he always…” mean? Surly? Angry? Bitchy? 

“No,” Devon said. It was another three footsteps and her sigh and the sunshine through the leaves. The subtle shift of the world all around them because here—in Georgia—things moved at half-speed. Then she looked at him, moving forward and standing still and he waited for her to say _she broke his heart_. “I think he figured out the woman he loved and the woman he married weren’t the same people. So, it’s like he can’t trust himself anymore because what he sees and what he feels isn’t what’s real. God-damn fool.” 

Yeah.

It was pebbles-across-road and she sighed again. “So, you want to fuck my brother?”

“I’m twenty four,” he said, “I want to fuck everyone.”

“I bet you I can find one person you don’t want to fuck.” She said it like she already knew _exactly_ the one and Kirk was stupid about bets so he shook on it with no terms except bragging rights. That was safe enough.

\--

Later—like, _later_ —he’d figure that it made sense and he _should have known_ because she looked like everything that Bones looked like he thought he wanted. But standing at the counter of the ice-cream shop waiting for Devon to come back from the bathroom and holding a bag full of things that were weighing his left side down, he didn’t know that woman staring at him from any other woman in the crowd.

She was just another face.

\--

It was like he was holding his breath and biting his tongue all at once because this here was another one of those situations like _major diplomatic incidents_ and he thought that all of the role-playing in the safe confines of the Academy walls was just about worth shit when you found yourself face-to-fucking-face with the real life thing. 

This was Georgia and it was an alien land and he didn’t belong but she did because there were eyes just _staring_ like waiting for him to say the wrong thing but none of this thoughts would put themselves in any order that could be considered _right_. They all started with _Bitch_ and ended with _Bitch_ and somewhere between he thought they might have run along like _you-broke-his-heart-you-fucking_.

There was nothing but the realization that this woman was Bones’ God-damn image of perfection and there wasn’t no wonder he couldn’t stand bright lights, loud music and loose women. This woman had pink lips and pink fingernails with honey-colored hair and she smelled like _vanilla_ for fuck’s sake, like _cookies_ fresh from the oven. Her hair pulled back in a pony tail but it was wispy-perfect curls falling around her ears, she was _beautiful_ in that way Doris never wanted to be. She was a fucking romance novel in the flesh, looking at him with her little-girl-eyes asking him not to break her heart. It was her voice like a whisper (like a hiss) that was so sweet-and-pretty and he could just imagine her saying _I love you_ like she understood what that meant.

She said: “ _You’re_ Jim Kirk.”

He shifted the strap of the bag going across his shoulders, heard the cans and boxes clinking together, thinking (groceries were heavy) and trying to reason out what to say that would wrap everything he wanted to tell her all at once into a sentence and he’d never have to talk to her again. 

(Fuck off, he’s mine now.)

But this was diplomacy because down here in half-time Georgia everyone was nice as fluffy pillows. He scrubbed his hand against the side-seam of his pants and held it out saying: “ _James Tiberius_ Kirk.” Her eyebrow twitched as her lips parted across her white teeth and she wasn’t saying _I’ll rip your throat out_ but he was pretty sure she’d go straight for blood if he tried to get smart with _her_. “So,” he said with his hand hanging in the air, his breath stagnating in his chest and the whole weight of the room crushing his shoulders waiting for a riot, “do you have a name or is it really just _her_?”

Those women that Kirk grew up with—like Doris—they would have recoiled like they’d been smacked and maybe this woman would have too except it was hands-on-hips, feet-shifting-against the floor and everyone was taking in a breath. It was _start praying now, boy_ in that look on her face. She said: “Her, _really_? That’s the best he came up with?” like saying _I’ve called him a thousand things worse_ and she must have. The thought washed over her tongue and burned down his spine and there was a door opening somewhere back in the white-static of the room.

“He’s a gentleman,” Kirk agreed. 

Then there was a flicker in her eyes, over her eyebrows and a muscle in her jaw that knew _Leonard_ like only a lover and a wife could, like she’d grown up with him and there parts of him that were always going to belong to her. (Kirk _hated_ her like he hadn’t hated anyone in years.) That part of her knew, like he knew, that she’d been called things that would make a delicate soul faint but they were only _words_ so all that mattered was that in all the time since she said what she had to say—Bones hadn’t called her by her _name_ once. Kirk hoped it hurt her every day, straight through her skin into her heart and it was wrong-all-wrong and nothing but _mean_ but it was. “Yes he is,” she agreed.

“Jocelyn,” was Devon’s voice and her hand going around Kirk’s shoulder and her body against his side just to hold herself back, “you get prettier every time I see you. Bless your heart, how _do_ you do that?”

“Moisturizer,” she said, “Teagel’s, they sell it at the supermarket next to the hair conditioner.” 

Devon’s smile was dangerous like something feral, all white around the edges with no fairness in her soul at all. “You practically _glow_.”

\--

 _Fool’s climbed the woodpile again,_ was Granny’s only statement before she handed him two bottles and said nothing else. 

So he went outside and walked around until he found a pile of wood that must have been _the_ woodpile and he was climbing up it, trying to hold two bottles and nearly landing on his ass because logs-rolled and there was no way you actually climbed this fucking thing without breaking something. He was whispering _shit_ with his elbows-against-hard-wood and about to find a ladder when the chuckle dropped right out of heaven.

“Hand me the bottles,” Bones was saying, perched on the edge of the roof like he was a spider. It was all dark save for moonlight and stars but it colored him like he was glowing.

“Of course you want the liquor,” Kirk said. He handed them up and Bones set them in the gutters before he reset his feet and held his hand out.

It wasn’t _trust me_ or _I want you_ but it was _come on, I got you_ so Kirk climbed up enough he could get a good grip and they were struggle-pull- _fuck you’re heavy_ before they were both on the roof.

“You know,” he said with a little whiskey in him, “I can’t help but think this isn’t a great idea.”

“Getting drunk on the roof?” Bones asked. He waved his hand around like it didn’t matter, he was a _doctor_ and that was it. “The ground’s soft.” Because Bones had fallen off this roof before, once or twice, so he knew.

It was sips and swallows and arguing-about-constellations later when Kirk was shoulder to shoulder with Bones, wishing he could hold his hand and not sure how he felt about that when he said: “I’m sorry about your wife,” just because he’d never said it before.

“She sure was pretty, wasn’t she?” Bones mumbled back. Then he was sitting up, heels slipping down the shingles on the roof as he took the last drink and let the bottle go rolling down until it was clanging in the gutter. “I’m going to jump off the roof now.”

“What?” Kirk asked.

“Don’t worry, ground’s soft.”

\--

Bones’ mouth tasted like honey because his voice sounded like honey and his body wasn’t flat because he wasn’t a flat sort of guy. He had rises and planes and dips and valleys like anyone else. He had warm skin under his waist band and up there where arms hugged chest, he was like sun-on-the-water and it was all beautiful. His breath was going oh-oh-oh and his hands were going (just like this, just like this) up and down Kirk’s back.

It wasn’t real because there was no anxiety and hesitation and Bones never did anything worth doing without holding back and hiding something. So it was all a dream but it was a _dream_ worth having so he tilted his head and pressed forward until it wasn’t Kirk and then Bones but KirkandBones one and indistinguishable.

He woke up hard and sweating and Bones was clutching pillows over on the pile of things he called a bed and Kirk was counting his breaths to dull the throb but it was doing nothing at all. So he rolled over, crept out of the room and found the bathroom. It was dirty-bad-wrong and no-manners-at-all to jack off hard to last-night’s-dream when there were bottles of baby shampoo and little-girl-toothbrushes staring at him like innocent witnesses but he couldn’t help it.

\--

“Have a seat,” Granny said when he arrived in the kitchen because sleeping-was-dangerous and listening to Bones breath was worse. She motioned to the floor at her feet while she dug her fingers into something in a bowl that didn’t look like anything he wanted to eat but what the fuck did he know. 

Nothing, so he sat in his pajama pants on the floor with his bare back against a cold cabinet and watched her apron sway and thought things about nothing but if he thought something he thought he might have wondered what Bones looked like when he was a kid. Someone had to have taken pictures of him sitting here, all big-eyes and adoration of this woman or his mother—then he wanted to know about _her_ because all he knew was that she had died. (And maybe that Bones had loved her.)

“Do you have a name?” he asked, head-against-the cabinet. 

Her lips pulled up at the corners and her eyes crinkled and she was a strangely beautiful woman like that. Like she was full of magic as she tipped her head just enough to say: “That’s my secret.” He must have snorted because she was giving him a look like _don’t you believe me_ before she said: “My Daddy met a travelling man from a different world with a strange face that told him that names have power. So my Daddy gave me a name that had all the power of the universe. And it’s just my secret.” 

Then she was scooping her index finger into the bowl and holding it down to him like he was supposed to—take it or eat it—and it smelled like butter but it looked like nothing he wanted in his mouth. He stared at it before he took it and rolled it between his finger and thumb. “Do you believe that?”

“I believe everything my Daddy told me,” Granny said. Then the bowl was scraping the counter and there was a slap that didn’t sound like much he’d heard before. “He told me I was going to grow up to be an old, old woman and he told me that things weren’t going to be easy and he said, ‘Life’s hard’ and ‘Work’s harder’ and he said ‘Never be lazy and look after yourself and your family’ so when things got hard, I worked harder and when I wanted to sit I kept walking.” She was shaking flour now, it was falling like snowflakes down from the countertop.

Kirk eyed the dough ball getting sticking in his fingers and said nothing because there was nothing to say. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to say anything. 

“When I was hurt, I sat down and I cried,” Granny said, “because nobody’s perfect—but you ask them two up those stairs if I ever cried and they’d say that I was born without tear ducts like they used to say I ate nails for breakfast. That’s called being love-blind, they don’t see anything but what they feel.” She was smacking wood-to-wood and Kirk was blinking up into the fall of flour. “Devon just about grew out of it because she’s more like her Mama—bless that woman—and she’s more like me and she knows that you cry when you’re hurt and you laugh when you’re happy and its ok if you can’t tell the difference now and again.” Then she looked down at him, “you going to taste that dough or not?”

He pushed it into his mouth and it was like runny-gum that had already been chewed and tasted like salt and then flour and butter and he wanted to spit it back out.

Granny laughed at him. “That’s what you get for hanging onto it, go on and spit it out.” She kicked the trashcan at him so he pushed it out of his mouth and she kept on talking. “I got a question I need to ask you and you ain’t going to want to answer it, that’s alright, but I need you to answer it anyway.” She stopped rolling the dough to turn to look down at him. 

He must have thought he knew what she was going to ask him because, “I love him,” was puking right out of his chest without any kind of prompting and it didn’t funny things to his heart and his gut like he had half an idea what fear was and had any right using words he hadn’t ever defined. 

“Oh I know you do,” Granny said, “Jocelyn loved him too and that was before when he was easy to love and all sweet-kisses-and-love-songs.” Because once upon a time, Bones had been a naïve little boy that fell in love with a naïve little girl and they grew up together and found out the world was full of sharp edges and dark turns. 

“What’s the question?” he asked.

\--

“Don’t tell me that you’re not reading them because I know you’re reading them, Lenny because they didn’t go missing until you showed up. So give them back,” was Devon in the hall with her baby on one hip and Susanna complaining from the bathroom about having to go pee when she _didn’t have to, Mommy_. 

Bones was against the wall looking half-asleep and all annoyed, muttering things about only-one-bathroom and scratching his head with a yawn and saying: “I didn’t take your stupid books,” again because he’d been saying it his whole life.

“Oh, bull,” Devon said.

Kirk was on the stairs, elbows on the ledge of the floor, looking at them through the railing. Bones saw him and pointed a finger, “he probably took them.”

“Jim?” Like it was unbelievable. “Jim took my romance books? Really, Lenny?”

“He reads _anything_ ,” Bones said in self-defense. “He reads _instruction manuals_.” Because nobody ever read those except the fools that wanted to know what all the buttons did and most of the time Kirk didn’t really read them either except when he was out of better things. 

“Romance books?” he prompted.

“Lenny used to steal them all the time and take them up to the roof and read them.”

“It was thirteen!” Bones shouted, “they were porn. Of course I read them.” Like this man here had any use for porn at thirteen or twenty or twenty-nine. He looked like he thought that his side of the argument was perfectly valid and Devon turned to look at Kirk because _who do you think you’re fooling_ was just about the only thing that could be said to _that_. “Shut up Jim,” Bones said to him.

“Porn?” Devon repeated, “you didn’t even read them for porn because the one that you stole _and never gave back_ didn’t even have real sex in it. Just kissing and don’t tell me that you didn’t take it because I know you did.”

“You lost that book at school,” Bones said with a finger pointing.

“You _took_ it!”

“Then where’d I hide it? You didn’t find it in twelve years of searching and we all know that I’m not good at hiding a damn thing, so where’d I put it if I took it?” He was smug in her face and she was stumped so she was telling Susanna to stop fussing and finish up because there was breakfast to be cooked and they were going swimming later. 

The argument wasn’t over just because Devon didn’t have a comeback, it was just waiting around until she thought of one and the way Bones rolled his eyes was just inviting trouble.

“Romance Bones?” he said.

“I said _shut up_ , Jim.”

\--

Kirk didn’t go looking precisely. Just that if he happened to be in the closet he was tapping his knuckle against the walls and the floorboards looking for somewhere hollow. And if he moved the bed it was because he dropped a sock. When he took the mattress off it was because he needed to turn it over after years of Bones snuggling a hole in just one spot. 

If Devon found him pulling drawers out of the desk and turning them over to check the bottom she didn’t say _I’ll help you_ like _I know it’s here_ but she smiled and casually started going through the shelves with her knuckle rapping the back. She told him it was just a regular book, single novel on a thin PADD that was kind of pink and kind of maroon and the screen was set to perpetual dim because Bones would hide under his blankets or up on the roof while he was reading them and didn’t like to get caught.

“Hell,” she said with her head in the box spring, “I caught him and Jocelyn having sex and he didn’t care half as much.”

No, of course not. Kirk was running his hands down the insides of the desk like it was up a lady’s skirt and thinking he wasn’t going to find a damn thing. Bones didn’t take the book or Devon really lost it—or it just wasn’t there anymore. 

Then Bones was in the doorway dripping wet with two little girls hanging off his shoulders and a curious eyebrow asking _what the fuck_ they were doing. He didn’t say that he hadn’t taken the book because he’d already said it once or twice or six times. 

Devon stood up and straightened her dress and took her girls to change out of sprinkler-jumping clothes to lunch-eating clothes and Bones leaned back against the doorframe and cocked an eyebrow at Kirk. “I thought you were smarter than that.”

He didn’t stay to explain that and Kirk frowned as he sat on his knees with his hands inside a desk.

\--

“It’s not strip poker,” Bones said across the table. There were six shot glasses in front of Kirk, six by Granny’s elbow, six by Devon’s hand and six just staring Bones in the face. Then there was Kirk’s shirt tossed over to the side because it was fucking hot and he was from up-north where it _snowed_.

“I’m just trying to distract you so I can win this game,” Kirk said. He flexed his arm and made the muscle go tight which got him pinched by Devon but ignored by Bones. Then it was pouring shots and dealing cards. 

Devon was frowning at her hand while Granny was holding hers steady without a twitch and Bones was drawing faces in the spilt liquor while they played. 

Until Bones was sucking on his fingers.

Until Bones was shrugging his shirt off.

“Looks like you’re losing, Sunny,” Devon said.

Kirk was half drunk on shots, blinking blurrily at her while Bones sat with like the victor with no empty glasses and Granny was knocking back another because they’d all lost another round. Kirk thought _it must be no fun to be the only sober man at a drunk party_ but he stood up instead, hand going to the button of his jeans. “I can fix that.”

Devon howled and Granny set her elbow against the tabletop and waited for him to shimmy his jeans down to his knees and batted her eyelashes at him. He said: “my eyes are up here.”

Devon said: “sunny, you must have a golden dick if it turned Lenny crooked.”

They were laughing like slapping the table because they were six-seven-eight-ten shots in and it was something damn nice and probably local. Kirk was shaking his pants off his ankles and then there was a draft like someone left too suddenly and Bones was gone.

\--

“Hey!” he shouted through the dark, running on socks with no pants, crashing himself against Bones’ back and they stumbled but didn’t fall. He was being shoved and drunk as he was there was no fighting the impulse to hit back. He fisted handfuls of skin, twisting Bones’ arms because it wasn’t _his fucking fault_ and he didn’t do it and if they never fucked that would be _fine_.

Bones was shouting words at him that were punches in his numb ears that he couldn’t quite hear or understand, all he knew was there was heat and anger and hurt all under his hands. He had a thousand unanswered questions knocking through his skull while Bones was saying:

“Fuck you.”

Kirk was gulping his own spit like fresh alcohol saying: “if you want to,” because he didn’t know better.

\--

“Here,” was Bones in the morning passing out glasses of something orange and not juice. He set one in front of Granny, slapped one in front of Devon so she flinched from the noise and handed the last one to Kirk.

Forgiveness was a miracle cure to hangovers. Spite was the way their mouths tasted like toe-nails for the rest of the day.

\--

It was after midnight, long about the time the summer was just about out of days and nights, when Kirk _figured it out_. He picked himself up out of the rocking chair and went into the house, past the chill of the air to the steps and around the turn, to the bedroom. Bones’ bag was on the floor by the door and Kirk was crouching next to it, having no business going through it but he did anyway. One hand-blind, pushing around the clothes until he found the PADD real slender and real small, pink-like-maroon with a dim screen in the bottom of the bag.

He stared at it and thought _he shouldn’t_ but he never had a Mommy to tell him it was wrong and this was _starving-man’s morals._ He put himself on Bones’ bed and hit the screen and started to read like this was _the last secret_ that mattered.

\--

It was forty pages later when Bones found him and Kirk looked at him only for a second before he cleared his throat and started to read out loud. The words were heavy and thick and full of meanings that had meanings until it was just ridiculous and purple-obscene.

“Stop,” Bones said and: “if you’re going to mock me then do it,” and “damn it Jim.” He stood in the doorway until he was kicking the floor until he was sitting on the bed. He was sitting on the bed until he was scooting down to lay on the bed while Kirk read to him. It was all stupid, because the book was about _Fiona_ the red-headed heroine and there was some guy named Adam Corban who was all reluctant and kind of a jackass. That was alright because Fiona was kind of an idiot and that meant they were kind of perfect for one another.

When his voice got hoarse—thirty pages later—Bones was taking it from him and he cleared his throat and shifted so he could hold it and read it and he started to _read_ like this bullshit was real love and nothing but poetry. 

Only when he read it—it was—because he wanted it to be.

\--

It went like this—because he couldn’t help it—because there was sunlight breaking through the windows and Bones’ scratchy worn-out voice saying things like (I love you) and this was where the man had grown up. This was where he’d learned everything he thought he knew about love, where he learned about sex and maybe it was because his skin was warm. It was because when Kirk’s hand touched his belly it wasn’t pushed away, when it was fingertips-against-skin there was a sigh-over-teeth. It was one of his legs over Bones; it was knees hooking together, the tilt and shift until they were all but face to face, whispering words without meaning. Bones made his voice a falsetto when he read Fiona’s lines and it sounded stupid and _queer_ in the wrong ways. Kirk was smiling into his shoulder, laughing as his hand inched its way up so it was his palm-over-skin and a heartbeat thudding.

Maybe it was warm, maybe they were all sober.

Kirk pushed himself up on one elbow and leaned across the book, through the words and his tongue was wet but his lips were all dry—he wasn’t nervous only they’d done this before and it had nothing to do with sex because if they never made it there he thought it wouldn’t be _so bad_. Just with a tip of his head and no space at all, his hand was over Bones’ heartbeat and their lips were brushing together without kissing—he wanted this.

He thought Fiona was an idiot and Adam was a brutish jackass but they loved one another in a desperate way that only fools and idiots could do—with nothing between them, not even air, and Bones had dragged this fucking book with him through his life.

It was shift and then nudge and Bones’ mouth was damp because he was licking his lips and then he was touching Kirk with his hands that were all chilly and it made him shiver. Fingers under his shirt-sleeve and then it was _kissing_ like he hadn’t ever kissed anyone.

He wanted to say (I love you) and he wanted to say (I always will) and he wanted to say (I know you’re scared) because Bones’ heartbeat was thud-thud-thud in his chest and his fingers were curling like scratches that wanted to hold on but if they fell the ground wasn’t soft where they’d land.

So he thought (life gets hard and you work harder) but Bones was breathing damp-hot-breath against his cheek and it felt like tears before it was another kiss and a hand on his neck saying (stay, stay, stay with me) and Kirk didn’t know what they were talking about anymore.

He said, (I always want to be with you) with his hands and his mouth and the way his body was wound around Bones’ because it was warm and this was—

A broken kiss, damp lips and Bones wasn’t looking at him because he was turning his head away-toward-the-door saying:

“Don’t kiss me like that.”


	7. stay with me, i'm better like this/black holes and revelations

07.  
 _ **side a: stay with me, i'm better like this**_  
 _Ok_ , was Jim’s whisper like giving up and giving in and saying: _I love you, I’ll always love you even if you can’t stand it_ and Bones thought he should have been ashamed of himself. But it wasn’t in his hands and it wasn’t in his chest and it wasn’t behind his closed eyes. It wasn’t in the space that didn’t exist between them as Jim settled against his side and curled his fingers like a fist across his chest just to press hard down and feel his heart.

It went _thump-a-thump-a-thump_ because he was still alive and there was comfort in the way he could put his arm around Jim and feel the heat of him and the uncomfortable dig of the PADD in their sides. It was nothing glorious but Jim stayed there, eyes closed and breathing soft until the girls were awake and they had to move.

\--

Devon was _furious_ like her heart was broke into a hundred pieces and then she was pushing him hands-over-shoulders until he moved back. It wasn’t that she was strong enough to make his feet stumble it was that she was _ashamed of him_ in that way he should have been ashamed of himself and wasn’t. Her pain was real and poignant and fresh, like tears on her face because her husband ran off and left her without saying _good-bye_ and he didn’t stare at her on the porch like _I still love you_. And he’d said _sorry_ to her across the communicator like he had any right and it was going to make it _better_ , but it was a slap in the face and Devon was _furious_ every minute of every day she wasn’t broken down.

“You idiot,” she said when she slapped at his shoulders and she kept pushing until they were falling. They were kids in the dirt and she was spitting-mad and willing to draw blood. He wrestled her while she called him a fool until her fingernails were biting into his bare skin and sweat-stung so he pushed her to the side and she was wiping her face with her dirty fingers just leaving streaks like war paint. 

“She wasn’t the one, Leonard, she _wasn’t_ because if she was then she wouldn’t ever have left you and you’re nothing but a _coward_ and a fool!” Then there were tears on her lashes because her chest was breaking apart into sobs and he thought he should hug her—so he did—and she hit his arms and his neck and his ears until they hurt. 

So he didn’t say: _it’ll get better_ he didn’t say _keep on moving_ and he would never tell her _you’ll love again_ because those were words off pages from books he read and thought he understood. Linear lines in a plot that led to the inevitable conclusion and sure there was sorrow and there was darkness but there was a sunshine-bright ending with a Mommy and Daddy and two bouncing babies born in a snowstorm. 

He said: “Don’t you leave your girls.”

Because Daddy loved Mommy every _day_ in every possible _way_ until it killed him all inside where nobody could see and there was nothing left to keep him living so he left behind two little babies that didn’t much understand _why_. Granny made it a soft-toned fairy tale so it was easy to swallow but the truth was that Daddy didn’t love _them_ enough to keep on moving. Devon looked at him with her swollen-red eyes and she nodded her head.

She said: “You just weren’t ready, it’s ok.”

Like he needed someone to forgive him for what he’d done.

\--

Back at the Academy after the silence of the shuttle ride, far from the stifling heat of Georgia, there was a notice waiting to announce that there had been an _error_ regarding their room placement the previous year. Saying that it was all the database’s fault and they should never have been rooming with one another. Kirk was _reassigned_ elsewhere and Bones was moved in somewhere singular because he never had gotten along with anyone.

So Jim packed his books into his boxes and he said: “help me carry these,” and Bones did because they were friends, forget kissing, and Jim’s new roommate was going to hate him. H-A-T-E all capitals and glowing neon. 

“Drinks on Thursday?” Jim asked when he showed him the door.

“Sure,” Bones said. “Milk or orange juice?”

Jim’s smile was sweet-shy-sly. “Orange juice.” 

Then the door was closed and the summer was over with Bones standing on the other side of it. 

\--

It wasn’t that Thursday because Jim had this _seminar thing_ and you know how that goes (sure he did) and Bones had to work so there was _no way_ to work around their schedules but it was the week after for sure. 

There was no reason to be disappointed because he said _don’t kiss me like that_ and meant _let’s just be friends_ and friends didn’t live together and eat together and walk together and sleep together. So if the silence was deafening in the room all around him until he was pulling the blankets over his head so his own breath sounded like it was coming from somewhere _else_ that was just part of it. Friends were friends from safe distances where nobody’s heart got in the way and sex was that thing you talked about with curse words and lewd gestures but it never got between you.

So he looked at the sunshine through the gap in the blanket and didn’t think stupid things because it was _fine_ just _fine_.

\--

The usual waitress was named Katrina and she was a pretty thing from somewhere across the water but her great-great-great grandfather had lived right here in San Francisco for a really long time. Only he had to go back for a while and well, she always wondered what it was like over here and if you could go into outer space like going to the beach there was no reason she couldn’t cross an ocean.

Bones didn’t care but she sat in the seat across from him and chattered-chattered-chattered while they waited for Jim to show up because he was going to be _late_. There was no seminar but there was probably some pretty girl from his class that was willing enough to take her clothes off or suck his dick. Because Jim was through with the bar-and-club crowd where the girls were multi-colored and vipers just waiting to steal your soul for an evening. Maybe he wanted a wholesome girl that would do unwholesome things to him just for the sake of variety.

Katrina was coiling her hair on her fingertips and smiling at him blankly like she knew that he knew that it was _late_ and even _later_ than just that. He said not much of anything but ordered something to eat and she drown him in sympathetic stares while she went to put that in. He ate by himself until the doorbell was ringing over head.

“Bones,” Jim was saying all breathless-pink-excitement. “Bones, have you ever heard of the Kobayashi Maru?”

Sure, he was stuck in the exam room listening to babbling command-track cadets crying over how they’d failed and there was just no way to beat the test while another was chewing their nails in the waiting room because they were next to take it and they heard—like everyone heard—that there was no way to beat that test.

“No,” he said because maybe he wanted to hear Jim explain it to him.

\--

There was this thing and maybe Jim always said it or maybe he said it now, like a constant reminder—just in case, maybe, Bones forgot it for half a minute. It wasn’t the words but the way he said it and it wasn’t the look on his face because Jim never looked any different than he ever did. He was blue-eyes-white-skin-blond-hair and all fucking muscle. He had a big head and a big brain and a stupid mouth that ran off and he never could control it except when they were two-thirty-AM-in the rec-room finishing up one last game of single-board-flat-archaic-chess because that’s how Bones wanted to play and Jim was teaching him the history of the world starting somewhere BC. Men were wearing animal fat to stay warm and women were objects and the world was revolutionized by a God-damn arrowhead.

Jim talked about the ice-age because it was all _sweet nothings_ and Bones listened because it was the sound of his voice and the brightness of his eyes thinking fast-fast-faster so when Jim won the game he’d gloat. He’d say: _I don’t think you’re trying_ and they’d say their good-byes but sooner or later it was right back at it come next week.

That thing that Jim said was all in his voice and that wasn’t any different either, because it oozed arrogance like _hey ladies_ and a turn, walk backward, lap-chapped-lips and a whistle like _damn they’re fine_. So it was the way Jim pointed his finger and looked at him and said: “I want you there.”

So Bones was there. Wherever there was.

\--

The Kobayashi Maru was a matter of gray jumpsuits and nervous instructors giving Jim strange looks because they saw things like _emotional distress_ and _violent crime_ in his record that were all meant to be _past tense_ but you never could tell what it was that was going to make this one crack. Bones stepped to one side with them and they asked him if Jim was _ready_ and _capable_ and Bones glared at them until they were stepping back all in their words and offering justification for simple questions.

So yes, he was ready. He took his seat in the captain’s chair and he played along with their game while they made the decision to save the damn ship and ended up with a bridge full of dead crew members. Bones was laying on the ground playing dead while he watched Jim leaning forward in the chair and his face wasn’t anything at all like it _always_ was. 

When it was over and they were cleaning up the wreckage and bothering to tell Jim he’d _failed_ , Bones was leaning against the console he’d been pretending to operate and watching Jim hang his head until he was nodding his head until it wasn’t defeat just a setback and he was saying:

“Next time…”

Because Jim Kirk didn’t believe in God-damn no-win-scenarios.

\--

It was middle of the night—late in the dark and he hadn’t been sleeping or even laying down, just sitting at his desk thinking about people dying and what he knew about things he didn’t really know. Maybe he’d taken the time to look up an article or six on what happened to Jim’s father that filled in gaps of what he knew about the events. He found himself wondering if Jim had ever wondered what kind of a fiery hell his father had died in up in space where there was no sound.

The door bell rang through the single-bed-unit and Bones looked over at it thinking _just come in_. Jim had to have been a telepath because the door slid open and he came in with nothing in his hands or over his shoulder but he looked like a boy that had a nightmare and wanted to share a bed. Bones sighed.

Jim’s shoes were muddy like he’d run straight up and down the state and his eyes were black all underneath like he couldn’t remember the last time he slept. Bones looked over toward his skinny bed and then back at Kirk and it was nothing but a bad-bad-bad idea but they were both nodding.

Bones sat against the headboard, Kirk laid with his head toward the footboard and for no good reason at all they were talking about theoretical like fact and the question that nobody could answer because if there were a fire and there was an old woman a young woman and a baby and you could only save one: who would you save? Someone smart in Kirk’s class had said the baby because the others could save themselves and someone said the young woman because she could always have another baby and a debate became an argument became a brawl with words.

Bones found himself rubbing Kirk’s calves because they were all knots and he didn’t pay attention to when the talking stopped but he knew when all he could hear was the sound of breath. 

When he looked down the bed Kirk was lying on his arms behind his head and watching him with half-closed eyes. “Your sister, your granny or Jocelyn?” Jim asked him.

Questions like that had no answers. “My Granny would beat me with a wooden spoon if I let my sister die,” he said.

“And Jocelyn?”

Bones shrugged, hands moving higher, working the abused muscles closest to Jim’s knee saying: “She wouldn’t have been in my house.” Later, when Jim was sleeping and Bones was watching him through the moonlight he thought— _kid, you’d save them all_ and he didn’t know if it was stupidity or faith or something between those two.

\--

Jim met Gaila the way that people meet. She was something pretty and strange and he was something pretty and stranger. He spent a while talking about Orions and asking about compatibility and asking about pheromones before he ended up deciding that there was no spell she was casting that didn’t have to do with her quirky smile and her pretty hair and it was just fine if he wanted to spend a little time with her.

They didn’t fuck. 

Jim said he was _trying something new_ and Gaila looked like she had almost convinced herself she was glad that someone liked her with her clothes on.

\--

The second time he failed the Kobayashi Maru, Jim grabbed him by the collar and dragged him straight to the bar. Two rounds in he was banging on the table shouting about cheaters and pointing his finger making conspiracy theories about how the test wasn’t beatable—but everyone knew that so they acted like it was just fine. But it was a test and there was always a way to beat a test and if this were some kind of challenge than damn it, _James Tiberius Kirk_ was going to overcome it.

Four rounds after he was looking at Bones while he leaned back in the booth and something pretty in a slinky shirt was licking his ear. Jim was thinking _remember that night, remember the dumpster and the bar and remember the woman under the table kicking you while she sucked me off_ and Bones took a drink because his memory was just fine. Jim’s eyes were slow and his head tilted to the side, his tongue barely out and then in again, he was kissing _her_ because he wanted to fuck her.

It was empty, animal and Jim might have figured out that it left him with nothing but stains on his skin and clothes. Maybe it was enough for him. Bones ordered another round and he drank his and left Jim’s because he didn’t want to watch the man make out with someone else.

\--

Devon sent him strange letters about fall leaves and winter winds and asked him strange things about sunny shores and never once mentioned Jim or what she thought must-have-happened. Her questions were all between the lines and they were easy to boil down and rearrange because she only ever asked him one thing.

\--

Bones was spinning circles on his doctor’s chair, getting dizzy because he _could_ when the door opened and some nurse with a name that was scared of him like they were all _avoidant_ told him that some poor fool had asked for him by name and specifically. He grabbed the exam table and slapped the soles of his boots against the floor while the world swam in erratic circles around his skull. When it came into focus it was Jim with his head tilted and his knees bent staring at his eyes with a curious kitten’s smile.

“Alright?”

“I might puke,” he said before he fell back into the chair and closed his eyes but the darkness there was swimming too. “What happened? Broke your dick?”

“Splinter,” Jim said.

“In your dick?”

Jim was staring at him like he was a sadistic genius and Bones opened his mouth because he had _stories_ but there were two pink palms facing him saying _stop right there_ and he did. Then it was Jim on the table with his knees spread and his index finger pointing out. The splinter was nothing that required medical attention but he pulled it out with his tweezers anyway.

“Did you have a reason to be here?” Bones asked him, one hand on the table and one on Jim’s thigh like he had any right to touch him like that. He had a hundred reasons not to touch him like that, not to blur the line and his damn hand didn’t care.

“Susanna, Jenny or Devon?” 

“Oh hell, Devon would save them both.” Because mothers didn’t leave their babies in burning buildings. He thought that maybe he should turn the question around, to ask Jim who he’d save and thought that maybe he was afraid to know the answer because he liked the way _he’d save them all_ left him feeling safe at night. Maybe it was too much to put on one man when he hadn’t ever done much to save anyone in his life but he _believed_ it like a fool.

\--

Bones knew when Jim started fucking Gaila because he was informed with a note that said:

 _Damn, green’s my new favorite color_. 

So Bones rolled his eyes because he _didn’t care_ and didn’t want to _know_ but he said: _finally try Brussels sprouts?_

Jim was laughing when he read it, running his hand down his face like he did and getting serious while his roommate was plotting how to kill him because his roommate was a square with sharp corners. Precise-crisp-perfect and Jim was chaos in motion. He said: _spinach—with lots of salt._

\--

The roommate lasted five months before he was crying to the rooming office that he couldn’t take it anymore and while Jim wasn’t breaking any rules they just couldn’t live together. Jim was leaning back in his desk chair looking across at the empty half of the room where the roommate-used-to-be with a sense of pride and a giggle.

“What was wrong with him, anyway?” around the cup of orange juice.

Bones was sitting on the edge of the desk playing with one of those frustrating marble games where every little ball had to be inside the circle and he couldn’t get them all so he was shaking it now and again while Jim just watched him tongue-over-lips like it was _sex_. “OCD,” Bones mumbled, “probably.” He tipped the box one way and the little metal marbles all rolled out of the pink-plastic circle. “Why do you play with these stupid things?”

“They develop my problem solving and fine motor skills,” Jim said.

That was a load of bullshit that left the room smelling bad because Jim hadn’t played with the damn things six months ago so it was nothing but another way to annoy his roommate which was all-petty. Then again, Jim didn’t know how to share if he didn’t feel like he should have to. Bones picked up his glass and took a drink and lifted the box to stare at it again. “What finally did it?”

“I threw my class ring away,” Jim answered. He pointed around the glass into the trash receptacle under Bones’ foot and there was a little black box lying in the bottom with wrappers from take-out food. “Apparently, you’re not supposed to do that because they’re expensive.”

Bones leaned down and picked the box out of the trash. “Why’d you buy it if you were going to throw it away?”

“I didn’t,” Jim said, “Winona bought it.”

So he opened the case and looked at the ring and thought it wasn’t half bad—a little big, nothing that Jim would wear unless someone else’s life depended on it. “Don’t throw it away,” he said like his opinion was going to make the difference and he was playing with the puzzle again.

Jim picked the case up and stared at the ring while he held the glass against his chest and he frowned at it like he could frown at his mother wherever she was. Like she didn’t already know he frowned at her every day he could. “Did you have one?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do with it?” 

Bones tipped the box and the last metal marble rolled into the tiny opening in the moving pink circle and that was _victory_ at last so he didn’t think too much he just said: “I gave it to her.” He set the box down and Jim was tilting his head like _is that what you do with it?_

\--

It was out on the grass, three-quarters of the way from Jim's room to his room when he got this feeling like a poke in his ribs that his pockets weren’t empty but they should have been. He hadn't put a damn thing in that pocket but his hands were smoothing down his jacket and finding a bump and then his searching fingers found something warm and metal and he was standing there staring at a fucking class ring. In his head he could see Jim leaning back in the chair, plucking the ring out of the box and looking left toward-the-bathroom where Bones had gone to piss away the orange juice they'd guzzled. Maybe he thought a moment or maybe he didn't, but it all ended with him leaning forward and slipping the ring into an empty pocket.

Bones must have looked crazy staring at the ring but his thoughts started with:

He _didn’t_

And ended with:

Silence.  
\--

Jim was fucking Gaila but that never stopped a man from fucking someone else if they came along and two weeks later he was sending a note that said: _one color shy of a full rainbow, Bones_.

Bones rolled his eyes and pushed his thumb against the ring on his pinkie that neither of them exactly talked about because neither of them knew if it were something like: I wanted you to have it or _you should have one_ because _she_ wasn’t ever giving his back. Not that they talked about that either. Bones wore it because Jim gave it to him and that was all they needed to know.

He sent a message back saying: _which one are you missing?_

Jim said: _indigo_.

\--

Third time’s a charm but Jim never did find him anyone colored indigo to fuck. He found the answer to the Kobayashi Maru in a bit of code that he installed into the simulation and he smirked his smug-fucking victory right into the faces of the astounded and pissed off professors who hadn’t _ever_ not _ever_ been challenged the way that Kirk challenged them. It was a challenge of respect, authority and genius and Bones was left sitting in the crowd to decide his loyalties.

But he’d been there, when Jim was out-of-that gray jumpsuit and right back into his clothes with his shaking hands and his furious smile and everything had been hot-as-fire because there was no such fucking thing as a no-win-scenario. It was something profound wrapped up in something ridiculous cushioned by arms that wound around him and held on and nobody said:

_You did it_

But there were plenty of faces here saying:

 _you shouldn’t have_.

Because little boys belonged in corners all seen-not-heard and there was one stiff-backed-Vulcan that was talking like there was no emotion and spouting one petty sentence after another about how Jim _didn’t get_ the test. Maybe he didn’t and maybe that wasn’t the point either. Maybe Bones hated the bastard Vulcan on principle for being a bitch.

Maybe someone should have told the smug-smiling-bastard that you didn’t trot out someone’s dead father to prove your point and the whole crowd was shifting one ass-cheek to the other because someone had told _them_ that. 

Then it was over—undecided, interrupted, and everyone was running.

\--

He called it a favor but it was a burning house. So he had a choice and it ran like this:

He saved his own ass and walked away because Jim-did-a-bad-thing and he was in time-out like all bad boys belonged. It was smart and it was logical and it was everything that ethics committees were created to tell him that he should do because it followed all the rules and ignored all emotion. 

He (acted like he) saved Jim with a slap on the back and a half-thought platitude about how it-was-going-to-be okay and that just meant that it wasn’t okay now. This wasn’t forever but a setback and he’d gotten over those too. Everyone was going and he was staying and the only thing Bones had to douse the flames was a wet tissue.

Or he _saved_ Jim and in six months and seventeen combinations of possibilities, Jim hadn’t ever asked him _me or her_ when that was all he’d been wanting to ask the whole damn time. It came to that, in a crowded damn shuttle bay and Jim staring at his hands taking punishment for being a clever boy— This house was on fire and it had nothing to do with who he thought he was supposed to be in love with but there was Jim looking down and Bones looking right. He thought (I would have moved the world for _her_ ) and then there was no decision left to make.

\--&\--

_**side b: black holes and revelations** _  
The first thing was: Jim was Kirk ever since he discovered he wasn’t afraid of flying. It wasn’t much but it was what it was so he kept it in his chest where he thought it made a difference and called it his and maybe he was proud of it or maybe it made him sick. Sometimes—when he was flying, one fist over the other, through the air, falling-falling-falling and about to _die_ , he knew that fear had uses.

Just he had no use for it.

\--

The hand on his throat was tight-strong and alien and he thought (again, really, already?) and it was all sarcasm and no seriousness while his fingers were scrabbling. He didn’t believe in no-win-scenarios even if he was face-to-fucking-face with one because there was young Spock and older Spock and time travel and his life was fucked by some Romulan with an emotional disorder who killed his _father_. Who killed Vulcan, who killed Spock’s mother—

There was a gun and he was mumbling something when he couldn’t breathe and his tongue was swelling and his cheeks felt fat and he thought (I’m going to die) but that thought was whipped up and away in the rising chaos of other better thoughts about _surviving_ and well he’d rather think those than this.

He said: _I’ve got your gun_ and the Romulan that was crushing his throat looked _fucking surprised_.

Kirk would have grinned but gravity was pulling him down-down-fucking- _down_ and he’d forgotten his feet were in the air.

\--

 _Flying_ was hands on his chest and it was Grandpa Tiberius with a smile and his old-old-old man’s hair in the wind. The air was so damn cold and it made his chest hurt even as he giggled and Jim was a _baby_ just a little thing in a snowsuit that wore heavy gloves and a big hat with a ball on top (Grandma Laura made that) but he was _flying_ right through the air with his arms out and his mouth open.

It was snowflakes on his tongue until he wasn’t thinking but only feeling and the world tipped one-way-then-the-other and he thought (I’m going to fall) but Grandpa Tiberius’ arms were big and he was saying:

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

\--

Bones was beautiful, that was another thing. It was nothing important. It was a stray thought that he tucked around the edges of his life like a fleece blanket in the dead of winter and sometimes it kept him warm but sometimes he thought that he’d suffocate just from the heat of it. Because it wasn’t beauty like Gaila, it wasn’t beauty like flowers, it wasn’t beauty like love poems and ancient paintings or anything that could be _quantified_ or _qualified_ or held up against another similar and compared.

No.

Bones was beautiful like fucking rain clouds that made the sky gray and the air damp and everything smelled like it was just shy of being washed clean—tomorrow there would be a rainbow so you held your breath and waited but nobody stopped to look at those bruised clouds, thinking _this is beautiful_. 

In a room, in Georgia, Kirk had wanted to say _but I love you_. He pushed his fist against Bones’ heart because he thought ( _believe me, it’s true_ ). He wasn’t some bitch, he wasn’t going to break anyone’s heart and his own was heavy and hurt and maybe his belly wanted to scream injustice and fury. But Bones was beautiful like rain clouds whispering with ragged breath and clinging fingertips _stay with me_ and _this isn’t ever going to be easy_.

So Jim laid at his side with a barely-breathed _ok_.

\--

It was all air—swarming up and down and around and through his clothes and skin. It was a twig of wood under his feet and the burn of a rope in his hand, he was closing his eyes thinking _this is flying_ before he was letting it go and there was water swallowing him up. 

It was Georgia and Bones on the shore digging his stubborn heels in mud, shaking his head like Kirk was a boy shouting _again, again_. 

\--

It wasn’t Bones yet, because this was _Dr. McCoy_ with a bruise on his face who was sitting across the table from him, staring over a lump of meatloaf like he wanted to be any-fucking-where but there. Nobody wanted to know except the people that did and Dr. McCoy was living on obligation to make sure that Kirk was well-fed and all better before he let him get away.

In two-almost-three-years, Kirk hadn’t gotten any fucking smarter but he figured out a few things about obligation and sympathy and empathy and those tricky things called _souls_ , so when he thought of _Dr. McCoy_ across a lump of meatloaf he thought:

 _I saved him_ and not at all the other way around.

\--

 _Fuck-yes!_ was a heady scream and they were bursting through doors-into-the-air with their arms up and it was everywhere and bright-beautiful-strange. There were unfamiliar stars and unfamiliar air and Bones’ laugh was an unfamiliar tickle. Their pockets were full of credits and he had a fucking ace between his two fingers.

It was twist, turn, dancing in a parking lot because _fuck, yes_ and these boys were _free_ and _wild_ and oh-baby, they were _fine_.

\--

The second thing was, and he’d learned it long before Doris-the-librarian had told him so with all the wrong words: Kirk had never been in love. Once upon a time, when he was sixteen and bitter and old he told himself that _nobody had ever loved him_ either. The thought was an acid blanket that he kept him hot on cold nights and gave him excuses to hurt people and hurt things and hurt _himself_ because nobody cared.

But he smacked his mother when he was _twenty_ and she looked at him like she was sorry _for him_ and he hated her so much he couldn’t stand it. 

When he was twenty-three, in a bar, a man with a hard-on for tragic cases _dared him to do better_ like that was going to do anything but piss him off. It was a heavy thought that was under his skin and it was worms against acid because nobody-had-ever-loved-him (but his father).

Dr. Leonard McCoy was a strange man with an idiot’s fear and an ex-wife-like-a-bitch and Kirk thought (it was better he loved no one). He never wanted to see that man again but he remembered his name and he remembered his face and he remembered his _whiskey_.

When he was twenty five he was falling with nowhere to land his arms were trying to grab something but it was all _air_ and he _knew_ all at once that—

(he was going to die.)

\--

He was nine, maybe, and his mother was in the yard and Sam was there—Uncle Sam—and one of them was shouting _what do you know_ and the other was screaming:

_I knew him longer than you did!_

And then it was his mother with fists like hammers and Kirk-was-Jim-then so he didn’t know that she would have killed a man for lesser things. He knew that she was hurt and hateful; he knew that she was screaming at Uncle Sam and he knew but didn’t understand when she said:

 _He’s mine! He was_ always _mine!_

\--

At twenty four, Kirk had more secrets under his skin and they all ran like this:

Once, someone hit him and it _hurt_ and he remembered the boy named Kirk sitting on his stinging bottom with his chest full of air and his mind full of nothing because _nobody_ had ever-ever-ever hit him like that. He was thinking (I must be so bad) and he was thinking (maybe that’s why) but he never finished the thought because that boy named Jim knew even back then that:

No-one cared. Not when it mattered, not where it counted, not enough to do a God-damn thing. It was care from a distance across an intercom asking a little boy if he was sure. So it was the choice of cold indifference and a man that didn’t care _at all_ except for when chores didn’t get done. He was alone and after enough nights, he thought he could convince himself it didn’t matter and he was hollow just _full of thoughts_ like:

He wanted to bleed, some days. So he found someone, he found something until the tension bled away and he could be at peace for fifteen fucking seconds. If that meant fighting he had fists, if that meant fucking he had a dick and if that meant _getting fucked_ well he had a whole body that could be bruised and battered and _used_ until he found something inside himself that was all his until:

He found something inside himself that was like a blanket to wrap himself up in and it didn’t hurt and it wasn’t so bad and it left him so full he couldn’t breathe half the time anymore. So he was choking on words, thoughts and daydreams, wondering how good it could be. Because Bones was beautiful like fucking _rain clouds_ and there wasn’t anything that the man didn’t know about Jim—Bones had all his secrets memorized and he kept them in his own chest like sharing a burden. 

At twenty four, they were in Bones’ empty single dorm room talking about theoretical because they both knew that Kirk’s daddy had died in a fire in space saving his life. They both knew it hurt him, so Bones rubbed his legs like he _loved him_ and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to make it better if he could. Kirk was faking-sleep and Bones kissed his temple and it hurt just as much as it didn’t. Kirk wanted to hold him there forever but Bones would only run.

So it wasn’t exactly: if you love them, set them free, and if they come back—

But more like: Kirk could wait _forever_ if he had to. And if it never became anything but this—oh, fuck—he’d have _this_.

\--

Jocelyn was pretty in colors that Kirk couldn’t even _dream_ and she smiled at Devon like she was forgiving her for being so base and so rude because well, Jocelyn remembered getting _divorced_ and it was so hard to be nice. Her smile was pasted on and crooked when she looked at Kirk. 

He didn’t know then, but he knew now, that she was shouting _he’s mine_ into the wind and it was smacking her in the face until she was deaf from it. She gave him up. 

Kirk knew that.

So fuck Georgia-property-rules, this was starving-man-morals and he was _hungrier_ than her.

\--

He was twenty five in a free fall on a Romulan ship thinking _I’m going to die_ and all at once he knew that he was fucking _scared_ and it everywhere on his skin and under it and all he could think was (I want to see him again) and that paralyzed him in the little seconds between thoughts he was trying to scream but his throat was swollen and it was—

\--

The cabinet behind his head had a story because this was Georgia and that was Granny and every little piece of it had a story. Someone was born here, someone died here, and someone fell in love right here. Kirk was looking up at her saying: what’s your question?

She was looking down and she was saying, like asking, _what’s your secret?_

But that was his and he knew it as soon as she asked it like a burn in his chest. He didn’t know what to do with it and he didn’t want to think about it so he didn’t and looked down-not-up.

She said: “I don’t tell anyone’s secrets but I’ve got one that’s just about the worst-kept secret I’ve ever seen and that’s my boy up them stairs thinking Jocelyn was his one-and-only when he knows damn well that she wasn’t. He’s always known so it isn’t that she betrayed him, it’s he betrayed himself.”

Kirk had tried to think and tried to say something but there was nothing so he was shrugging and when he found something it was naughty-dirty-bad and he said: _I thought he was afraid of dick_.

So she smacked him with a spoon on the head and smiled like a twinkle in her eye and he was all forgiven and understood.

\--

Flying was his head against the frame of the car door and his mother’s silence like stones but the wind was in his face and they were far-away and never-going-back. He had no idea where the next stop was but Frank was behind them now.

\--

 _I love my mother_ was a gulp of breath. He needed to say it, to think it, to feel it before the air swallowed him and he was dead-at-twenty-five but no better than his father. Captain of a Starship, those Kirk’s, they say they were _cursed_. 

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe Bones wouldn’t be so sad, maybe he’d pick up the pieces and he’d be just fine because they hadn’t ever said (I love you) with words and his world wasn’t wrapped in orbit right around Bones’, it wasn’t that, it was somewhere they crashed one-into-the-other so if one of them stopped well, it wasn’t going to do no harm—

And then he thought:

\--

_No._

\--

It wasn’t going to end like that.

His ribs against metal, his arms out, his hands catching anything that would hold him. Fear in his body was pushing his muscles and his bones felt cracked into pieces and he was lying across a walkway all exhausted with no ability to move. Fear was strange but the thoughts that stayed with him were (I’m going to see him again) so fuck fear and fuck exhaustion and fuck broken ribs too—he was up and he was on his feet.

\--

When it ended, it _ended_ and suddenly there was nothing but one hysterical laughter that exploded in the whole ship with people looking one-at-the-other saying: _did we live, did we make it_ and there was a sigh that shuddered everything to a dead stop.

They had impulse power, he had broken bones and Spock had regulations to cite.

\--

“I did it,” he whispered to Bones in his bedroom because Sickbay was full to capacity with people in the halls. Bones was exhausted to the limit with a bag of tools and he was catching the bottom of Kirk’s shirt with his exhausted-fumbling hands all dirty around the nails before he was cutting it off. Under his clothes he was all bruises and Bones’ eyebrows said _damn_.

Jim was catching Bones’ tight-blue-shirt with what grip he had in his exhausted hands and he wanted to kiss him, he wanted to tell him, he wanted Bones to know that he knew that it was love because he was _scared_.

“Lay down,” Bones said because Kirk was _hurt_.

Kirk didn’t lie down but collapsed. That was ok. It was safe.

\--

It wasn’t the next morning but maybe a few after and replicated grapefruits did taste like feet. All of a sudden they weren’t puttering along on impulse power trying to find their way home but being rescued by another ship that had the _best_ engineering crew Starfleet had to offer. Scotty took it like a personal insult and was up in arms and ready to fight whoever-the-fuck thought they deserved his title. Maybe the Enterprise wasn’t doing so great now but give him a minute or five and some warp cores and he’d _show you_ the best engineering crew in Starfleet.

Kirk was in the transporter room with his ribs still wrapped because healing bones took forever and Bones didn’t have but minutes between long hours spent healing everyone else. The blue-glimmer was blinding and eye-watering and then Winona was there with a crowd behind her and she was full of orders, asking questions, and stopping to look at him and how he wore black-not-gold and squinting.

“Captain,” she said.

“Mom,” he returned.

\--

Scotty hated her and then he loved her and then was jealous of her until Kirk was almost entirely convinced that he wanted to have sex with her or steal her brain. Either way it was strange and he was tired and there were all these _things_ that had been theories in books that meant nothing in real life. He had hundreds and hundreds of lives waiting on his decisions and all he could think about were long arguments with Bones over booze and morals. 

Spock was stoic, cold, impersonal logic that didn’t pretend to be his friend but at least offered him a nod of respect. 

_Yes_ , the nod said, _you are clever_.

When Spock found him on day five of week one while they were still piecing back together bits of the broken ship, Kirk said: “yes, Mr. Spock?”

Spock said: “I felt I should inform you that upon our return I will be recommending a commendation for creative thinking regarding your solution to the Kobayashi Maru simulation.”

Kirk grinned because he couldn’t help it like he couldn’t help: “is that how Vulcans say they’re wrong?”

Spock’s eyebrow cocked up at the corner like he had never met anyone so fucking _cheeky_ and he said: “I was not wrong, Captain. You did, in fact, install a subroutine that changed the parameters of the situation thereby allowing you to—as you say—beat the test. I do not doubt this is the truth.” And he didn’t doubt that it was wrong either, but maybe there were more important things than tests now. Spock didn’t stay to chit-chat long about his decision or offer logical explanations because it seemed like something between an apology and a thank you. 

\-- 

He found Bones sleeping with his head on his medical kit and his mouth hanging open. There was a nurse named Chapel that was putting her finger to her lips like telling him to _shh_ and shooing him away. So he brushed his thumb down Bones’ hair where it was sweat-sticky to his face and bent down to kiss his temple like:

“Sweet dreams.”

\--

Kirk had to _request_ to see his mother because the repairs were just about finished and she was allowing _his_ crew to do the grunt work after she educated them in all the right ways. He heard through someone that heard through someone that saw it from a distance that she had laid into the cadets like they were seasoned veterans and told them that anything less than perfect was sloppy, shoddy fucking work.

He heard and the source was reliable enough, that someone said: _isn’t that the Captain’s mother? That_ figures.

He wasn’t sure what that meant. He thought it meant something good but there was just no telling—he knew that she was leaving and it would be months before she was due back on Earth for shore leave and her five-year-inspection of his life. So the thing was that he _almost died_ and he had this thing he needed to say to her (and another, a lot of others he had to say to _Bones_ but those would wait until he had the time and space). 

She came to the conference room, to attention and he didn’t even know what to do because he was twenty five and her son and she was a stranger named Winona who was his mother who had blue-eyes-like-his and blond-hair and it was a mirror but it wasn’t. Her arms were behind her back and she was waiting while he had no idea what to do.

“Permission to speak?” she asked.

“You’re my God-damn mother,” was all he said to her.

She looked at him with her head tilted a little-that-way and she might have been thinking (you’re my God-damn son) or she might not have been thinking at all. She stayed at attention while she looked at him and he bit his lip with his hands against the sides of his pants wishing he knew what he should be saying until she was talking—at last—and she said:

“I heard you gave Nero a chance to surrender and live.” 

Like it was an accusation and a prayer and a wonder all at once. Like she was a mother and a widow in a shuttle, sobbing over the loss of her life and clinging to a baby that was _all_ she had left and the last living proof that a man named George Kirk had ever been. 

“I did,” he said.

Her face was so blank, she was swallowing words as her throat worked and her stance slipped, went a little lax, her eyes were getting wet but she was just staring at him—fixed and blank—and then she said: “George would—George would have done that.”

But not her because Winona was vicious as a wounded beast, she didn’t have much left in her but what she had was all fury and spite and she would have _burned down the fucking house_ forget saving the old lady. 

“Yeah?” he asked.

She moved then, brushed at the hair on his forehead, at the bruises still on his face, down to his shoulder like she was having powerful-thoughts that were breaking her apart on the inside and who-the-hell-knows how she was going to come back together this time. Her voice was wet and she had tears in her eyes, everything he wanted her to say was choking her throat. But she said: “Yeah.”

He thought: _I can forgive you_ because someone needed to love her enough to forgive her for all the things she hadn’t done right or couldn’t be. He said, “I love you, Mom.”

Then it was a hug and a kiss against his forehead when she dragged him down and he held onto her even if his ribs were aching and she let out a sound like a sob that she couldn’t bear to let him hear. (He thought of Granny, he thought of love-blind babies and he tightened his arms around her like maybe he could squeeze the tears out.) “Jim,” she said when she was in her own space again. She was smiling, “he’d be so proud of you, he’d—I’m so proud of you.”

\--

So it was space dock and it was a million questions and it was transporting and it was medical for almost a full-fucking day getting healed by men with strange hands that asked him what he was allergic to because apparently Bones kept shit-records on him (strange, they said, all of the doctor’s other records were so well put together). Kirk didn’t know and had no answers and slept through as much of it as he could. 

When he woke up he had no bruises but a hundred obligations. There was a ceremony and he needed to shave—he needed to eat—he needed to sleep.

\--

When it was over—really over—it was just starting. Because it was five weeks since and another few months until and he’d have to finish out the rest of the exams that were waiting on him and there were meetings and formal papers and this and that but it didn’t matter because Pike was looking up at him saying: _I am relieved_ like it was all his doing.

Bones was in the crowd and the world was full of sunshine—he was a fucking _captain_ and—

\--

He knocked when he could have punched the code and gone straight through. He knocked because in his head this was another romance novel and he was Adam Corban waiting for Fiona to get around to opening the door. He thought (we never finished reading that) but (open the damn door). Kirk was half to cheating and then the door was sliding open; Bones was half into a yawn and half into a curse.

He put one hand up on the door frame because Kirk had one hand on the doorframe and the other was down at his hip while he stared. Kirk was grinning because he couldn’t stop thinking (I’m in love with you) on endless repeat. (I’m in love with you and you’re a God-damn romance-novel-heroine.)

“I want to kiss you _like that_ every damn day, Bones so I’m going to and you’re going to damn well _like it_.”

Bones’ eyebrow went up and his mouth pulled down and he took in a breath like he was revving up to start shouting but then it was a shrug and a half-smile and he said: “Ok.”


	8. i ain’t never had nobody like you

08.  
 **_hidden track: i ain’t never had nobody like you_ **  
He said _ok_ with Jim’s ring on his finger thinking: (how the hell did it take us so long) and then it didn’t matter because there was a hand on his cheek and a smile against his mouth. It wasn’t that crazy smile that had been plastered across the man’s face up on that damn starship, stretched from ear to ear until his cheekbones must have been exhausted from the effort. It wasn’t his crude little smile like a slap on the ass that he handed out in dark bars with his hand up someone’s skirt. But it wasn’t that clever-edged tilt of a smirk either because this wasn’t some test that nobody else had ever gotten perfect. 

No, this was a smile that was a giggle that was almost like a puff of a sob and Jim’s thumb was broad against his cheek, dragging down stubble he hadn’t bothered to shave, and fingers that were over his cheek, holding his face, they were so _close_ he could taste orange juice on Jim’s breath and he wanted to ask where his milk was but his eyes were slipping closed like they were _weighted down_. There was another hand on his arm, above his elbow and he thought he was just about stupid for stepping back, standing still, not moving like if he didn’t it would just _happen_ and he wanted it so bad he couldn’t breathe. 

The door hit the frame and they were all alone in the (universe) room, something cracked open in his chest and it was too hot and too bright so moved and it was _frantic_. It was elbows-over-shoulders and fingers in short hair, Jim was pulling him closer, refusing to get shorter, so Bones was on his toes when he never had to be any taller to kiss anyone else in his whole life. It was stupid and one of them was laughing and it had to have been Jim because it was silly-little-giggles like hiccups that shattered serious kisses. Every touch of lips was a gasp and his eyes were closed-open-closed until there were arms around his back and he wasn’t on his toes but off them like some kind of—

Oh hell, what did it even matter, he tilted his head and pressed their mouths together, Jim’s head was tipping back and his mouth was falling open and it was (I’ll love you forever) like promises neither of them had thought about making except for months ago in Georgia. He found T-shirt under his hands, in his way and his feet were back on the floor, he was tugging at cloth—looking for skin. Jim was tearing at his buttons and scraping his shoulders and arms and the inside of his elbows because naked-was-better and more-was-great. 

Bones stumbled back and licked his lips and Jim was pulling his shirt off, one-arm-over his head and there was something stupidly attractive about it and the way it made every muscle under his skin flex and shift. His damn chapped lips were pink-kissed-red.

Jim was hands-against-his-chest and Bones was fists-above-elbows hanging onto him, pulling him back. One of them tried to move and one of them tripped and he couldn’t tell which was which but he knew his bare back was stinging from hitting the floor. He knew Jim was giggling insane laughs against his neck, kissing him breathlessly like he couldn’t stop—tongue-lips-teeth, trailing an expedition down. 

Bones was stroking his hands over new skin, had to learn it, had to feel it, had to put it in his head, whispering (this is mine) because it was his, and he was shoving Jim off his knees and elbows, not over him but next to him and then pinning him against the floor. It wasn’t anything that wasn’t wanted, Jim’s legs were open so they Bones-Jim-Bones-Jim with their legs. He knocked his elbows against the ground, pushed his hand through blond-hair and tugged it so Jim’s chin was up and his throat was bare and kissed his way down until he heard a gasp-across-teeth and sucked on the skin there. 

Jim’s hands were at his shoulder-blades and down his back and across his waistband to his ass, his leg was pushing against his side and he wasn’t saying (come on) but the meaning was plain enough. Bones thought he wanted to fuck him because he almost lost him and he wanted to hug him because he looked-so-lost half the time and he wanted to kiss him because he loved him in a way that was all dangerous.

When rough fingers were on his face, behind his ears, just tugging, Bones moved up and it was a kiss like Georgia asking (please love me) and Bones was scared shitless and just about shivering but he was saying (yes, now and then and forever).

Jim wrapped two big-tight arms around him and rolled him over, it was Bones-Jim-Jim-Bones with their legs and that was alright because he was scratching at zippers and buttons and pants-around-thighs was half-naked skin that was raw and needy as desperate kisses. He was chanting Jim’s name under his breath while he pushed up and was pushed down and Jim was rubbing their cheeks together, losing-finding long kisses.

\--

He was on his back, head-turned-left and Jim was on his gut, head-turned-right so they were looking at one another. Hand-over-hand, catching their breath and working out of their clothes until they were naked under the sunlight and _still on the floor_ but that was okay. 

Jim’s fingers were moving up, away from his hand, to pick at the spots of light on his chest. He wasn’t a boy in a closet but he was still a boy and he hadn’t ever been in love with anyone but a library before. He traced a heart with the tip of his finger and stared at it like it was ink in Bones’ skin. He’d never ask (be careful with me, be patient with me) because Bones hadn’t known to ask when it mattered either. Bones found his hand and held it, thought they weren’t so different so he didn’t understand why Jim felt so much bigger than him. Palm-to-palm they were about the same size just different textures. Fingers-woven-together it didn’t matter, he rolled onto his side and kissed Jim’s cheek and his temple and his eyebrow and the bridge of his nose and his chin.

There were stupid giggles and Jim was saying: “need a map, Bones?”

No. He kissed him. It was a sweet-chaste kiss that you gave a girl when her Daddy was watching you through the window but your heart was ninety-miles-a-minute and you wanted your hand in her shirt or all her clothes off. He was up on one elbow and Jim was half-on his back and they were staring into the face of things that scared the hell out of them.

Jim’s hand was curling around his arm over his elbow from where it was caught under his side. He said: “Kiss me like that again.”

So he kissed like he could say: _I’m sorry_ and _I love you_ and _I’ve wanted you for so long_ and maybe he started to understand when Jim trembled a little. He was scared in Georgia but Jim wasn’t and it just wasn’t right.

So there they were, on the floor, naked in the sunlight, scared and stupid.

\--

Sooner or later, like lazy little puppies, they’d rolled themselves around the floor enough that rolling wasn’t enough. Jim had all his blankets stripped to the end of the bed so they wouldn’t get dirty, there was a tube of lubricant rescued from a lost pair of pants and _expectations_. 

Jim was elbows and knees over him, close enough to be warm and not crushing or pushing. Neither of them were breathing because everywhere they accidentally touched was kisses and licks like promises. Bones had one arm over his head, hand wiggled between headboard-and-mattress. The world was on perpetual pause all around him save for the echoing thud of his heart and the patient-impatient shift of Jim over him.

So he tipped his head, neck straining and stared down between them. Jim looked down with him and they were eying dicks like connoisseurs. It was stupid and he felt stupid but this was serious and he cleared his throat and said: “no wonder you get laid all the time.”

A little hum agreed with him. “Word of mouth is a wonderful thing.” A pause like a thought and, “You’d be surprised how often it keeps me from getting laid.” He shrugged one-sided and reached down to run his hand up the length of his own dick like petting it. “Not everyone likes a big dick.”

“Someone must have said they were afraid it wouldn’t fit,” Bones said because someone had to have said it so he was just repeating.

Jim’s grin was toxic—pleased, smug, arrogant, amused and _perfect_ —he was giving him a condescending look of reassuring-pity saying: “Don’t worry baby, I always get it in.” He yelped when he got hit but he didn’t act like he didn’t deserve it. Just that Bones beating on his shoulders and arms was a reason to wrestle and they almost fell off the bed before Jim flopped on his back and showed his palms (I give, I give). Bones was between his legs, laying all against him to keep him down and pressing kisses against his lips like teases.

He shifted and Jim moaned between their mouths and Bones slid a hand between them, cool palm over blood-hot skin. “I’m not convinced.” He was joking because they were joking but nobody was making jokes. A kiss and then: “I’ve got a tight ass.”

A kiss and: “Do you?” Jim was asking.

A kiss and: “I’ve been told.”

A kiss and then Jim was staring up at him, getting that look in his eyes—that strange look, and Bones wasn’t sure—hadn’t ever been sure—that Jim even remembered hitting that man in the bar because he’d been nothing but a rabid animal pounding fists into the body long after it had been shouting for help and barely defending itself. “I think ass in general is tight—it’s what they all say.”

“Have you ever fucked a man?” Bones asked him with no kisses. He was lifting himself up on his knees; air was breezing between layers of sweat that stuck their skin together like salt-glue. 

Jim’s head was all to one side asking: _haven’t you been listening_ like they hadn’t had this conversation before and weren’t having it now in silence between their eyebrows. Jim lapped his tongue across his lips and put his arm over his head, all stretch and shift and _just fuck me now_. “Maybe one—or two—or a _hundred_.”

“I know you’ve been fucked,” Bones said. “Have you ever fucked a man?”

“Are you asking if I’m experienced, Bones? Or are we arguing application of verbs—have you ever fucked _anyone_?” Then Jim was rolling his eyes and shaking the question away like it wasn’t important saying: “Never mind, forget it—fuck me.”

“I’m not going to fuck you.”

Jim blinked at him. 

“You’re not going to fuck me,” Bones said. There was anger in his chest and fear in his belly and Jim was all looking-left and not-talking-about-that because there were places they didn’t fit together without sharp edges. He was stubborn and Jim was—whatever he was. “We’re going to…” 

“Make love?” Jim supplied, “have sex? If we’re going to argue semantics, I’m going to need to get more comfortable. You have any more pillows?” Then he was wriggling under him, working the pillows so they were under his back, his head was at a funny angle and his fingers were woven together over his tight belly while he was saying: _ready now_ like being an asshole for no reason. But his legs were splayed open and knees spread wide. “I’ll argue for fucking if you argue for making love.”

“I love you,” Bones said. _Right now, when you don’t want me to_.

Jim’s cruel-smile faltered and his eyes got wide-blue-clear. Bones curled a hand around his waist and pulled him down—moving up, over him, pressing their mouths together and Jim was slack and loose and confused under him. He kissed his cheeks and his chin and his neck until he was being pulled up and Jim was whispering (I love you) before he kissed him. 

\--

“Bones,” Jim panted against his mouth, eyes closed, body getting wet with sweat as his hips were working like he had no control over it. His hands were pulling like _needing_ his lips were shiny and red and he said: “Fu—ma—” like he couldn’t find a word that he liked for what he wanted. Somewhere between fucking and love, Jim was opening his eyes and asking him just to do it. “Me,” is what he said. 

Then it was a tube of lubricant and a fumble of body parts, he was working his fingers in while he kissed Jim’s belly and traced designs with his tongues and teeth. Jim was trembling, teeth clenched and sighing: “are you giving me a prostate exam?”

Bones laughed because that was stupid and he said: “I’m multitasking.” Before he was pulled up hands-under-his-arms and Jim was biting at his mouth and neck, telling him with words that weren’t even words that it was enough. Making him promises about how it was all going to be fine. 

Stupid words between their bodies. He was shaking while Jim was still and it was all just-plain-dumb but they found their way together and Jim dropped his head back with a hiss and tightened his legs around Bones, saying: (it’s alright). 

He thought of Jocelyn—the first time—thought how she cried, thought how she held onto him, thought that he’d loved her then with all his little boy heart and knew she was forever and always. When the thought faded away it was the smell-taste-sound-feel of Jim soaking straight through him, burning away everything that came before until it was faded-photographs. 

He was _shaking_ and Jim was pulling him down and saying: “it’s alright, it’s alright.” It was the squeeze and release of hands on his hips that showed him how to move until he found his way and then it was breathless kissing and slow-pace until it wasn’t _alright_ but _damn it_ and Jim was trying to move faster or harder, wriggling under him. Soaked and glowing and glorious with his head back and his fists pulling. 

“Bones,” was a prayer like curses at him. His eyes were so blue and his face was pink, he had tears on his cheeks as he pulled him down and that kiss was saying ( _be careful with me_ ) so Bones held his hand as he moved.

\--

After, there was no room on the bed so they were skin-to-skin in their stink and stickiness. 

“I think that was cheating,” was Jim’s whisper against his collarbone with his leg across Bones’ thigh. 

“I thought that was winning a fight for once,” Bones mumbled back. He was half-asleep and Jim was tracing hearts on his chest again.

\--

He woke up sweat-glued to Jim who was trying to elbow him off without waking him up but it must have been hours and the stickiness wasn’t romantic anymore just disgusting and everything smelled. Jim had one leg hooked around the side of the bed trying to drag his body off the edge without making it seem like a wild-escape plan.

Bones bit his shoulder because it was close and called him an idiot and got kissed for a minute-maybe-more before: “I really have to piss,” interrupted them. Jim was apologizing with a frown but he was climbing off the bed and gone and groaning like it was the best-damn-thing-ever in the bathroom. 

So it was trying to shower with two people and no space in the corner stall with their hands all over each other and more soap than three people needed. Bones washed his own hair and Jim just watched. “Food,” Bones said, “no sex—food.”

“Breakfast,” Jim agreed.

\--

Katrina at Edna’s was tickled-pink to see them, eying the hickey on Jim’s neck with a strange frown-smile and saying it’d been so long since they were here together. Fist-against-her-hip she lectured them about everything from never calling to never writing to running off trying to die. Then everyone was in the dining room cooks-and-managers and waitresses congratulating Jim on saving the world. He took it all in with sighs and oh-it-was-nothing’s but he’d never been anyone’s hero before so he was breathless and pink-glowing.

“Can I get pancakes?” he asked them when they were half-done fawning over him. He looked so pathetic and starved that they said he could have whatever he wanted and double and it was all for-free. 

So Jim had pancakes and Bones had steak and eggs just because he could. Katrina stayed and told them all about how that drill had been making the earth shake here in San Francisco until she ran out of things to say. Then she was glancing back and forth between them and clucking her tongue. “It’s about time.”

Jim frowned. “How do they know?” he asked when she was gone.

“She’s a woman,” Bones said, “they always know.” Then he pointed. “Or it’s that hickey.”

Jim nodded and pointed his syrup-sticky fork at Bones’ throat. “Or that one.”

“Or both.”

Might have been both.

\--&\--

Bones had this thing for hands that was strange. Maybe it only felt strange—maybe it was nothing—maybe he couldn’t stop grinning because Bones couldn’t stop holding his hand. Across the table while Katrina-the-nosy-waitress watched from across the room. On their way out the door when Bones was holding it open for him because he was all _southern gentleman_ and Kirk should have been annoyed but he was stupid love-blind and just fine with it. Out in the cool, damp air of San Francisco after dark, Kirk’s fingers were tangled all up with Bones and there were no words because there was touch and thumbs that were stroking one down the other.

He giggled halfway from here to there and it was like thumb-war instead of thumb kissing until Bones was shoving him with his other hand and Kirk just dragged him over.

His back against the hard wall, his leg falling open just to make room because he wanted Bones closer-closer-up against him. It was ten fingers all laced together up by their shoulders and Bones was smiling against his lips. One of them was a naïve little boy and one of them was a love-drunk fool. Kirk was brushing their mouths together without kissing, just hiccupping little laughs at his own thoughts until Bones’ mouth as open over his and they were kissing.

Steak and eggs and pancakes and chocolate milkshakes—all at once and mixed-matched-wrong-right. He was pushing his arms forward, losing the grip of hands but finding shoulders to put his arms over, pulling Bones closer and squeezing him just so there was no room but the space their clothes took up.

\--

It was holding-hands down the halls while they ran past empty rooms. Kirk thought he should have cared, it should have mattered, he should have been wrapped up in sorrow and empathy and _pain_ and maybe (tomorrow) that would come but it was knocking against the door and the frame. It was fumbling cool-fingertips pushing the lock and then they were stripping off clothes like they couldn’t wait. 

Like nothing could wait, like it was life-or-death and Bones was kissing him like _that_ until his head was spinning and nobody had ever _loved_ him before. So he shoved and pushed until Bones was sitting on the bed and Kirk was in his lap and kissing him, fingers in his hair and working his hips, taking him in. Bones’ hands were up and down his back with no hurry, just touching—just feeling—just memorizing. 

\--

“Use a marker,” was Bones half-asleep and half-awake talking to Kirk’s finger on his chest, “lasts longer.” Then he was groaning awake and wiggling to roll onto his side, knocking the blankets out of the perfect placement it had taken half the night to find. But he was sleepy-eyed with bad breath and blinking at him , one hand on his ear propping his head up.

It felt like they were supposed to have a serious conversation about something. Kirk didn’t have anything to say because he’d said it all at the start when he stood at the door and announced his intentions. Maybe after when Bones said (I love you) when he looked like he wanted to murder him instead. 

“So,” Bones said.

“So.”

“If you cheat on me I’ll castrate you and make it look like an accident,” Bones said. Like he’d been thinking about it for a while and this was his only condition. Then he kissed Kirk with his bad breath and it was half-disgusting and half-distracting and not at all unwelcome.

“What if I just…”

“I’ll castrate you,” Bones said.

“What if my life depends on it?” Kirk asked. 

Bones was giving him that one-eyebrow-up look of disbelief asking him to name one situation where his life was going to depend on sex with anyone else. Then he cleared his throat and said: “I’ll castrate you.”

Kirk pinched him and Bones flinched but didn’t look repentant. “What if _your_ life depended on it?” Kirk asked and shoved him back. “And it wasn’t sex but just—kissing?” Bones went lax under him, flat on his back and hanging onto his arm, head half-under a pillow and staring at him. “Or like…touching.”

“Then I might blow you one last time before I castrated you just so you wouldn’t think I was ungrateful.” But the important part was that— “But I’d still castrate you.”

“What if the whole crew’s life depended on it and I had no choice because I couldn’t let everyone on the Enterprise die?” He was toying with the hair over Bones’ ears like some kind of love-sick fool but it was soft and dark and tickled his fingers. 

“Then I might let you fuck me one more time—or twice—but I’d still—”

“Castrate you,” Kirk said with him. 

Bones smiled. “Exactly.”

\--

He hadn’t been counting the hours but he knew that it was at least seven since the last time they’d fucked or had sex or made love or whatever verb they were going to slap on it. He thought about idly in floating little bursts and bubbles while Bones sat back against the headboard and read to him. It was the last twenty pages of that fucking romance novel and Fiona was throwing a temper-tantrum about something. Corban was going to set her straight and make her see the way and someone was going to get kissed good and proper because this love was _forever_. Only in books it was always _making love_ because they were _romance_. Kirk was tangling his fingers with Bones in a petulant war of knuckles and bones, trying to win something he wasn’t even fighting but every time he thought he figured out how to come out on top, Bones would straighten his hand and their fingers would part. So he did it again and they started over, lying together, squeezing—tightening—and finally fighting.

Bones would get all tight in his voice and Fiona’s bitchy falsetto would be angry like she _meant it_ but Corban’s deep-belly voice would growl like he never loved her _more_. Kirk thought that he wanted to fuck Bones and maybe he meant _make love_ to him but it came down to the same thing and words were meaningless unless you thought they meant something. He couldn’t settle if they did—if it made a difference—he knew what he felt in his chest, he knew what he felt with his hands and fingers and he knew as he rolled more onto his belly and tightened his fingers together so they squeezed with a tug that he wanted Bones to lean down and kiss him.

He wanted to taste those words on his tongue; he wanted to lick the sincerity that Bones gave them right out of his mouth. He wanted to understand what a little boy in Georgia had felt when he tucked this book away into the corners of his life and kept it like a secret. 

Bones looked at him, all out of the corner of his eyes and lapped his tongue across his lips when he got to the end of a sentence. His eyebrow was curious and he was leaning down to kiss him—awkward as it was all at bad angles. 

Kirk was leaning his head back so his throat was all stretched out; Bones was staring down the naked lines of his body forgetting about romance, dreaming about sex. “What changes?” Kirk asked. 

“Seasons,” Bones told him and pushed the book over on the bedside table. Something clattered to the floor but it was one-glance to make sure it wasn’t important and back to looking at him. Shift of body, drag of fabric and Bones was so much closer in all the best ways. “Underwear, hopefully.”

“You’re fucking hilarious,” Kirk said. He was tracing his hand down Bones’ bare chest, tip-toeing over the soft cool skin on his sides to step-step-push his pants off his hip where the butterfly was. The man didn’t strike him as a bug-lover but there were things left to learn about this man and he was satisfied to have a mystery still.

“Good-looking too,” Bones agreed. “Nothing changes with me and you, Jim. Except you can’t fuck anyone else.”

“That’s it?” 

“We’ve just about been married for months, Jim. Except you’ve been sleeping in someone else’s bed.” Then the bed was squeaking because Bones was over him, hands and knees and looking down with his bangs hanging away from his face. 

Kirk was hanging onto his wrists not thinking (I wanted you to care who’s bed I was in) because it was nothing but petty that he’d been updating Bones on his fucking calendar for five months like sticking out his tongue saying (you could have had this) just waiting for Bones to say he wanted it. “Whose fault is that?” he asked.

“Yours,” Bones said. 

“Mine? I distinctly remember it being your fault.” Remembered _don’t kiss me like that_ as if there hadn’t been six months and an exploding planet between them and it. Like he remembered watching Bones wearing his ring for months trying to figure out what the fuck that meant and acting like he didn’t notice or didn’t care or maybe had half a fucking idea what Bones was thinking at the time. 

“You could have had me then,” Bones said, “all you had to do was push.”

Good to know that now—maybe better to know it now—maybe it wasn’t. He didn’t care much except for the insane little laugh that came out of his chest and he was pushing now, shoving Bones over until they were wrestling on a narrow bed. Bones was flat on his back with a leg around him and his cheeks all pink with effort, hair messy and sweaty and bubbling up laughter. 

“I’m pushing you now,” Kirk said. Pushing him into the mattress with his body.

Bones tipped his head to one side and his pants were off one hip and barely hanging onto the other. His voice was heavy with breath and his tongue licked over his lips like _anticipation_ because he said: “so push me.”

\--

It was pushing like one hand on Bones chest to hold him there and the way the sheets bunched under Kirk’s knees as he wiggled his way down, it was pulling off pants and throwing them back somewhere—anywhere—not here. He was licking his way down hot skin and Bones was pulling at his hair with restless hands. His skin tasted like salt and his belly pulled in tight and fluttered with his breath. 

“Jim,” he said from somewhere up there with his fingers spread and they were tugging up and pushing down all at once. Kirk was kissing his way around to it, thinking about things he wanted to do, about things he wanted so bad it made his body heavy. But his hands felt too big and his arms felt too tight so he wound his hand around Bones blood-hot skin and followed it with his mouth. 

All he heard was stuttering ah-ha-ah and it was pushing like holding Bones’ hips against the bed because he was wriggle-writhe-want and trying to fuck his face. 

“Jim,” Bones said as his body started to quiver and he was straining against him, trying to get free and rubbing against his shoulders. “Jim,” like a little sob and his legs were spread open around Kirk’s body, shivering with every breath. “G—damn-t,” was cut into groans and little moans. Bones’ head was falling back because his chest was coming up and his fingers were pulling at his hair like saying _I’m going to—_

And then he did.

\--

“Well spit it out,” Bones said (just like his Granny and oh that thought was so out of place) as he fumbled around for a shirt or a pillowcase or a cup or anything. He found a wadded up T-shirt and threw it at Kirk so he could spit the taste out of his mouth. “I tried to warn you.” He was still catching his breath, spread out and languid in his afterglow, not at all hurried or concerned about anything. 

Kirk was wiping his mouth and then his tongue and threw the shirt over his shoulder where it landed against the ground and he leaned forward on his hands, ducked his head and kissed his way back up Bones body to his mouth, caught lazy kisses there until his body was throbbing with thoughts and needs. There was a hand at the back of his neck and a half-smile that was half-scared into the next kiss.

“Boy,” Bones said, “if you don’t fuck me right now I’m going to start thinking you don’t want to.”

So he laughed and all his weight was on elbows and their bodies were pressed together but nobody was pushing but Bones was pulling with his legs around him and his hand at his neck. “Don’t think that,” he said.

“I’m not indigo,” Bones said. Then he was kissing away that thought and the next one. Fuck the rainbow and all the people that came before, because Bones held onto him with arms and legs and fingers and toes. 

\--

“If,” Bones said five minutes later as he pushed himself up to his elbow and the up-down kiss because side-to-side but Kirk still had his pants on and he was still held tight against Bones in a constant rub-and-grind by the unrelenting grip of the man’s thighs, “you’re worried I’m going to get pregnant,” was cut into pieces by impatient kisses and the squeeze-grip-insistence of Bones rocking against him, “I’m on the pill.”

“God,” Kirk breathed as he found himself on his back. It was half because Bones was grinding his ass against him, half for the way the light caught the flex of muscle in his shoulders and arms and a another half for: “that’s just wrong, Bones.”

“A girl can never be too careful,” was kissed into his neck and down his chest. “You’re no good,” licked into his belly just about the time he started to lose his mind and he was going to tell Bones that you’re-no-good was sort of the problem but then he was being pushed and nudged until his shoulders were against the headboard and his pants were dangling at the end of Bones hand to be thrown aside. “Look at you.” Then it was hands going up the insides of his legs and pushing his thighs apart. Bones was on his elbows and belly on the bed, looking up at him past his dick and his breath was so hot and so close that there weren’t many thoughts left that mattered in comparison. “If you last more than two minutes I’ll buy breakfast.”

“You think you’re that good?” Kirk said and his voice was rough as the awkward angle of his neck.

“You’re that ready.”

\--

Breakfast was hot biscuits and cold-cold orange juice and walking around the campus staring at the empty places. Saving a few hundred didn’t seem like that big of a fucking deal when there were so many that hadn’t come back. Kirk licked the taste of butter off his fingers and looked left at Bones sitting on the bench next to him and said: “Granny’s are better.”

“Georgia’s a little far away for breakfast,” Bones said. He considered the thought like he considered the last bite of his biscuit and there was something like a snort and a giggle that crossed his eyebrows before he chewed away his private thought.

“What?” Kirk asked.

“If I took you out on that lake again, you think you’d get around to getting me out of my panties?” 

Kirk half grinned, “you really want out of your panties that much?” He wanted to tell him that he wanted to push him flat against this bench right here and forget panties because he’d fuck him breathless until he was begging. He wanted him in every God-damn way you could want a person but—

Bones was licking orange juice off his lips giving him a funny look and then shaking his head and he never did answer it exactly before they started moving again. Going outside was dangerous because everyone knew who Kirk was now that he’d saved the world and everyone wanted to get to know him, was it true, did he really, and what about—

\--

There was a chirp on the communicator screen and Bones was in the shower so Kirk rolled over and found a sheet to wrap around his waist. He was floppy and well-fucked and in no particular hurry to wander over to the desk and accept the call. When he tapped the screen the chirp went away and the static of the connection burst out of the little speakers until the picture cleared and Devon was sitting there turning a knob below her screen with a frown.

“There you are,” she said and tried to see past him like she was in the room and not miles away, “Where’s that boy?”

“Shower,” Kirk said.

“Oh,” Devon whispered. Then she looked back over her shoulder and went to close a door before she was back and motioning him closer to the screen with a crook of her finger like this was going to be some secret between the two of them but once he got there her voice was loud like a shout across states saying: “ _Fuck my brother_.”

“Jesus,” he said to the ache in his ears and the words falling out of her mouth. 

“Don’t you take the Lord’s name in vain, Christ, Jim, where are your manners?” Her smile was just like Bones’ with little curly tips, “I just thought I’d tell you, it’s alright. In case you were waiting on permission.”

“He told you—” 

“Of course he didn’t,” she said. She read it right between the lines of those five-word-sentences that Bones sent her back every time she left him a message. Then she was sighing as she looked at him, chin on her palm like she wanted to punch his arm and sit out on the porch with those bottles of sweating hard lemonade. “You must have reasons,” she said.

“Not good ones,” he assured her. Then she shook her head and the shower turned off so Kirk nodded that way like she had any idea what was off in that direction. She nodded like she did and blew him a kiss before she turned the screen off.

\--

It was a week—maybe it was longer—and Kirk wasn’t too worried about too much. He was reading a book for a test and thinking about not much of anything but how Bones blankets smelled like sex even if they just washed them the day before and it might have been because they couldn’t manage to occupy the same space for an hour or three before someone’s hands wandered and someone’s mouth wandered and it was arching and pushing and pulling. Bones was learning his body like it was his favorite God-damn subject, conducting strange experiments that left him breathless and sleepy and all confused about why he’d wasted half his life hopping one bed to another if monogamy just meant the sex got better every fucking time.

Bones was supposed to be at work but he was there in their room stripping off his shirt, sniffing it under the arms and then tossing it in the laundry and not in the re-wear pile. The undershirt went next and he scratched his belly as he wandered into the bathroom without so much as an explanation. 

Kirk shifted on the bed, brought one knee up and watched him wander back out of the bathroom. He sat in the chair and pulled his boots off and Kirk said: “got off early?”

“No patients.” Then he stood up and tugged at his button as he went around the bed to pull open the drawer. His fingers pushed around this and then that before he closed it again. 

Kirk was watching muscle flexing and trying hard to stare at words but Bones was pushing at the pillows behind his back until he found the lube and tossed it at the foot of the bed. His pants were shimmying down his legs. “Planning something?”

“No,” Bones said as he pushed his stupid-white-briefs down too. Then he was naked as he flopped onto the foot of the bed, lying across it so his heel was against the low footboard and his other leg was spread open. “Why?”

“Seems like you were,” Kirk said.

Bones just shrugged like _that_ was stupid. He laid there stroking his own skin—all naked and all distracting and then turned to look at him. “What’re you reading?”

“I don’t remember.” 

That smile on Bones’ face was fantastic and awful all at once, his hand was down against his thigh drawing lines from knee to hip like a road map and he curled his other arm behind his head as he teased his own fingertips closer and closer to his hardening dick like he was going to get there soon—maybe—sooner or later—he had all day—and it drove Kirk crazy. “Do you have a test on it?”

“Probably,” Kirk mumbled. 

Bones was nodding as his hand slipped around—lower—down—instead of curling around. His body shifted and his knee worked up farther on the bed. He sighed as his fingers stroked. “So,” he said. He said it like _fuck me_ when he hadn’t said that in days. “You going to pass that test?”

“I haven’t failed one yet.”

But he got this look like—Bones didn’t believe that but he did but it was just _one of those things_ that people said when they wanted to make themselves look better. Thing was, Kirk hadn’t ever failed a test in his life and that wasn’t—important because Bones was shifting his hips and reaching to grab the lube, cap rolling across the sheets and hitting Kirk on the foot and who cared about education? Who cared about anything, even breathing? Except for Bones’ breathing in those little sighs as his slick-shiny fingers went slipping down his skin and his shoulders rolled forward as he canted his hips up to get—and he was biting his lip as his elbow moved and his belly quivered and the man was _finger-fucking_ himself on the end of the bed like it was _nothing_. 

“This seems like a plan to me,” Kirk said but he couldn’t remember the last time (last night maybe) he’d been this hard. 

Bones eyelids were fluttering and his thighs were flexing as he pushed his hips up against his own fingers like he couldn’t get them _deep enough_ and he’d ever even done this before even _one time_ in his life. His voice was a gasp across breath saying: “starving man morals.”

Kirk rolled forward, and Bones’ free hand pushed against his chest. His cheeks were pink and his neck was blushing and he was so hard as his knuckles sank down into his body. Breath catching on his tongue and lips and he said all-wet and all-need. “You stay there.”

“This is a plan,” wasn’t at all the complaint he wanted to say when he was staring down Bones’s long body and all that bare skin. He didn’t move but leaned against the hand holding him back to pull at the spread open knees and turn Bones’s so he could see better. 

“No,” as Bones resettled and his eyes closed for a second as his teeth closed around his lip again—right there was a shake-shiver-quiver of his shoulders and his belly and the almost unnoticeable flinch on the back of his hand as his fingers stroked that same spot again and again inside of him. “It’s an idea.”

Plan. “Where’d you get this idea?” he got a hand under Bones knee and pushed his leg up so it was against his chest and that was nothing but a bad idea that earned him a whimpering-moan because Bones fingers just sank in a little deeper and it must have felt so fucking—good. 

“Read it in a book,” Bones said against his own knee as he pushed his elbow to the bed and put his heel against the sheets and stared at him. He was tight with tension and pushed, squished, folded all up until it had to be uncomfortable. That flush on his face was reddest on his lips and his eyebrows were at strange angles like they were in pain but his throat was working on swallowing half-spoken moans.

“What book?” Kirk asked when all he was see was down and stretched skin and long fingers and all he was thinking was—now—and—sooner—and—

“Psychology book,” Bones mumbled.

Son of a bitch, and was trying to get closer but there was a foot against his chest and Bones was shaking his head no or just shaking, stroking his fingers in and out and back in again. It was nothing but sex and it was nothing but shameless and it was nothing that he thought Bones would ever be with his heavy-big-words like ‘making love’ and romance novels. Forever and monogamy and meaning and _relationships_ and—

Kirk pushed his foot and leaned over him, hand over his shoulder and mouth against his, tasting his victory laugh, his smirk and his moan. Bones leg was around him and his arm was still moving because his fingers were still working and Kirk bit his tongue and his lips and nipped at his jaw and sucked on his neck hard until Bones was wriggling and smacking his shoulder telling him to get off and calling him a vampire all in moans. 

It was lube on the bed sheets, on his fingers, it was his fingers-Bones’-fingers wrapped up in his body and the arch of ribs and the shake. A hiss like pain because it always hurt, didn’t matter who or how slow or how much you wanted it, there was always that first hiss of pain. He worked his fingers one-two buried in Bones until there were dirty hands pushing his pants off his hips and an insistent fist pulling him into place dick-first. Bones mouth was open against his and his eyes were half-closed so he didn’t ask with any words.

Kirk caught the lube again and then he was pushing forward and down and _in_ and Bones’ hands were on his arms as he cried out something that didn’t make any sense but nonsense. One thought was his thought and one might have been Bones’ thought but it came out like:

_I never—_

Bones was fingers in his hair, over his ears, around the back of his skull, holding him there while sweat beaded up on his forehead and pooled in the hollow of his throat. He opened his eyes as he let out a breath and it was: “I love you.”

“I love you,” Jim said when he kissed him. “I love you,” when he moved in him. “I love you,” with his hands against sheets, then one on his chest, on his neck, on his face holding him still while the whole world was rocking up and down. “I love you,” when his chest felt so tight it was going to explode. Bones was saying his name between catches of their lips, hanging on fingers-and-toes and pulling at his hips because more-more-more and it was sex and fucking and love and: “I love you,” when Bones dropped his head back and his body was tight-tight-tight because he was close-close-almost there. 

When he came he had two hands on Jim’s face, hanging onto his ears, holding him there as his eyes squeezed closed and there were tears on his lashes. Bones’ hand moved—jerky—stiff—right down his back, pushing a little saying _come on, keep going_ like _I can take it_ or _I want it_ and Jim twisted his fists in the blankets and pulled with every needy jerk of his hips—

\--

It was thirty minutes later and he pushed Bones against the wall in the shower and fucked him again wondering about all that time he’d thought he shouldn’t-couldn’t-wouldn’t. Bones’s fingers slid down the slick wall as he pushed his hips back and he took it like he always wanted it and that made no sense. 

\--

 

It was two hours, ordered-in replicator Chinese and Bones was reading him his text book again later when Kirk’s fingers walked right up the inside of his leg and Bones shifted a little to give him whatever room he wanted to explore but said: “you’re not getting any of that again today.”

“Sore?”

“Yes, darling, you have a big dick,” Bones said before he went back to reading the boring passages about—whatever—Kirk wasn’t even listening to it, he was contemplating the stitching on the leg-band of Bones’ briefs and the smell of Chinese food. He ran his fingernail down the little blue stitches until Bones smacked him in the head with the PADD and then tossed it off to the side like it wasn’t going to get broke being treated like that. “Why wouldn’t you do that before?”

Kirk pulled himself up so he was sitting next to him shoulder-to-shoulder like they used to sit and shrugged. “Didn’t think—I didn’t think I was supposed to.”

Bones left eyebrow called him a fucking moron and his scowl agreed that it hadn’t ever heard anything so ridiculous in its life. But he rolled his eyes like forgiving him. “Yeah—well, now you know that I like sex in a variety of ways.”

So he nodded. “Now I know.” What a thing to know and maybe his brain started thinking of ideas that were nothing but thinks about things that Bones wouldn’t ever do (like finger fucking himself at the end of the bed) and maybe he didn’t even want Bones to do. In his head they were sweat-filthy and full of possibility. 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that desk,” Bones said right in the middle of a serious thought about loud music and grinding. 

“What about it?” Kirk asked. Other than it needed to be cleaned off because it was stacked with PADDs and littered with empty boxes.

“I think you’d look good bent across it,” Bones said like he hadn’t said anything like the sort. Then he reached over to pick up his soda with a frown like he wished it was whiskey but not even heroes could bring alcohol onto Academy grounds. “Of course, you look good just about anywhere.”

“You’re a dirty old man,” Kirk said with a laugh like a giggle.

“Blow me,” Bones said.

“Can I fuck you again if I do?” he asked, looking left while Bones was looking right, mouth still around the top of the soda bottle and his tongue lapping around the rim of it like a lewd promise. “Don’t give me that look, I’m not the one talking about bending you across the desk, it’ll be missionary under the covers, just like the story books tell it, sweetheart.”

Bones glared at him as he swallowed the mouthful of soda. “You’re a handful of rose petals and a few candles short of a fucking romance novel, Jim.”

“Shut up Fiona,” Kirk said before Bones hit him with a pillow and it was wrestling until they were tumbling off the bed and rolling around until Bones was on his back with his palms up and he was breathless and hard and saying without saying anything _I give, I give_ like he always did. Kirk kissed him because he loved him.

Bones said: “maybe one more,” and pulled him closer all arms-and-legs, fingers-and-toes.


End file.
